Category Archives: Review Re-View
Van Helsing (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released May 7, 2004:
Crossover movies have a distasteful history in the world of cinema. Some movie exec gets the notion, “Hey, why can’t two great tastes taste great together?” But what we’re left with is usually uninspired (The Flintstones Meet the Jetsons notwithstanding). Crossovers for horror movies are the worst of the lot. For every Freddy vs. Jason there’s a dud, like 1966’s Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. That year went down in the annals of cinematic history, however, as it also gave us Billy the Kid versus Dracula, marking two entries in the expanding genre of cowboys battling famous monsters (as far as I know, this genre still stands at two movies). So what can one expect from Van Helsing, a big-budget creature feature that includes Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman?
Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman and a really big hat) is a secret soldier for a covert order of the Vatican. This covert order dispatches monsters and creepy-crawlies the world over. He’s been ordered to assist Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), the last in a Romanian family line that has sought to kill the infamous Dracula (Richard Roxburgh). It seems that their family line is dwindling. And Anna’s brother being turned into a werewolf doesn’t help the situation. If her family line dies before Dracula then they cannot enter heaven. Van Helsing comes to town to help out the locals who are terrorized by Dracula’s flying brides. Van Helsing effectively kills one of the vamp ladies and is celebrated as a hero by the village. As he gets closer to Anna he also learns more about his own mysterious past and his connection to a certain figure with big teeth.
The Big D has a dastardly plan. He wants to find Frankenstein’s monster (Shuler Hensley) to channel enough power through him to awaken zillions of goo-sacks harboring the vamp’s undead brood. Of course, Frankenstein’s monster isn’t too keen on this. Together, he and Van Helsing, with the help of Anna as well as a comic relief monk, battle to stop Dracula from unleashing his children of the night.
Van Helsing is stupid, stupid, stupid. Director Stephen Sommers exists in his own indulgent world where bigger is better and some CGI spackle will fix any plot holes. He makes check-your-brain-at-the-door popcorn movies, but a “popcorn movie” is no excuse to forgive a rambling, incoherent, loud, stupid mess. I liked the first Mummy flick and even found some good with the second, but Van Helsing is Sommers at his rock-bottom worst, gorging on a trough of special effects and vomiting the results onto the big screen. Sommers’ idea of character development is knocking people through walls like they were in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Van Helsing raises some interesting questions, like why do Dracula’s brides morph into flying demons that are conveniently genitalia-free? Why does a werewolf rolling over the top of a carriage somehow cause it to catch on fire? Why does Dracula keep his magic lycanthropy cure in the open? It doesn’t matter. Van Helsing is so straight-laced about its absurdities that questioning them will just get tiresome.
Not that you would expect much, but the acting in Van Helsing is bad. Beckinsale’s accent couldn’t be less convincing if her role were played by Charo. The trio of Dracula’s brides are played by swimsuit models and let me just say their performance is on par with what you would expect from swimsuit models. Roxburgh is quite possibly the worst vampire in the modern history of vampires, and that includes Blacula, Count Chocula and Tom Cruise. He couldn’t look any less sinister if he was in a diaper and bonnet. What’s up with those strands of hair that dangle in his face? Why do the Van Helsing creators want their Prince of Evil and son of Satan to look like he was the keyboardist for some 80s pop synth band?
This overly long film feels like a seven-year-old’s book report that he hasn’t read: it’s like a child is making this up as they go. “And then … a werewolf pops up … and then Dracula’s flying brides … and then they all need Frankenstein’s monster ….” Seriously, were the penning this script on the fly? It’s a $150 million improv film. The reels of the film could be switched around and no one would be able to tell the difference. Van Helsing is one long, exasperated action sequence that drags its heels instead of wowing. It beats the audience into submission with its stupidity and redundancy.
The entertainment level of Van Helsing is exceedingly weak. It runs an eternity, which wouldn’t be a problem if one were intrigued by the story, the characters, or the action sequences. The action could have been suitable but Sommers has gotten less reliant on the physical and more superfluous with his CGI. Watching a CGI monstrosity smash into a CGI monstrosity before a CGI background where no semblance of reality is present grows tiresome after 130 minutes. The effects are passable, but they overload the viewer and numb whatever slight interest may have existed for the classic monsters.
What should have been a clever homage turns instead into a hollow marketing ploy that’s so frenetic and tireless with its manic pacing and bad special effects. Even the many attempts at humor are flat. It has to be some kind of apocalyptic sign that Hellboy and now Van Helsing have been unleashed unto the innocents of this world. Some will find Van Helsing decent popcorn entertainment, but most will grow weary of its sloppy design and wafer-thin substance. For me, this is one to avoid, period. There isn’t an ounce of fun to be had while sitting through the painful pair of hours that is Van Helsing. This is one monster mash that’s a real monster mess.
Nate’s Grade: D
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
In 2004, Van Helsing was being primed to be not just a blockbuster but the forerunner for a new interconnected franchise revitalizing the classic Universal horror icons. Director Stephen Sommers was hot off the success of the first two Mummy movies, Hugh Jackman had become a household name playing everyone’s favorite growling superhero, and Kate Beckinsale had proven her own box-office mettle fighting vampires and werewolves in the Underworld series. The studio was expecting so much that it planned a sequel, a TV series on NBC called Transylvania, an animated prequel, a clothing line, a video game, maybe even theme park additions, and to maintain the Eastern European sets so that they could be utilized for the eventual show and sequels. Obviously, this never came to pass, and Sommers’ last big Hollywood action movie was the 2009 G.I. Joe movie, and he hasn’t directed a movie since 2013’s Odd Thomas adaptation. He chose not to direct the third Mummy movie in 2008, but it seems like this man’s career has never been the same since Van Helsing cratered in the summer of 2004. It began as the studio asking Sommers for even more monster movies, Sommers pitching them all together as an Avengers-style super movie, the studio getting carried away with larger plans of franchise dominance, and then when it didn’t materialize, a promising popcorn filmmaker in the highest blockbuster sphere just vanished in a poof of overzealous CGI.
Me wife’s crush circa 2004
In 2004, I did not like Van Helsing. That might be too charitable a description. I wrote in my original review, “Van Helsing is stupid, stupid, stupid. [Sommers] exists in his own indulgent world where bigger is better and some CGI spackle will fix any plot holes. He makes check-your-brain-at-the-door popcorn movies, but a ‘popcorn movie’ is no excuse to forgive a rambling, incoherent, loud, stupid mess.” It was one of my worst movies of 2004, and twenty years later, I’ve mostly come around on the movie. I won’t tell you that it’s a great movie, or even achieves that same magic alchemy of action-adventure swash buckle that The Mummy brought back to major studio filmmaking in 1999, but Van Helsing is enjoyably ridiculous schlock nonsense. It was also one of my wife’s favorite movies growing up, and she reminded me that her teenage self had a big crush on Richard Roxburgh’s version of Dracula, not Hugh.
I now view Van Helsing less as a horror monster action vehicle and more of a spy vehicle in a strange world. The titular Van Helsing is our secret agent complete with spy gadgets with his comedic relief sidekick, and he’s got his important missions and the sexy Bond Girl, and the villains and betrayals and added back-story that doesn’t seem even necessary. It’s Sommers taking the structure of a spy thriller and supplanting it onto a Victorian-era monster steampunk universe of demons and centuries-old church conspiracies. Jackman is enjoyably suave as the Vatican’s favorite killing machine learning his own life lessons about the nature of legacy. I even enjoyed the villain’s motivation for Dracula; he’s trying to learn the secrets of Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimation to ensure that his vampy babies survive. Here is a Dracula who is bereft because he cannot father living children. I suppose there could be further discussion over the different forms of life as converting humans into vampires is itself a rebirth. Perhaps the distinction is like the difference between having biological children and adopted children. Maybe dear old Drac just wants to have a bundle of joy he can call his own. That’s more interesting than versions that make him out to be some stalker ex-boyfriend. Likewise, the role of Anna (Beckinsale) is given more pathos than simply being the Strong Romani Badass. While her wardrobe consists of corsets and teased hair to appeal to a young male demo, her character’s mission is powerful and personal. Anna needs to kill Dracula not to save herself but to ensure the rest of her deceased family members can enter heaven. Talk about cumulative family guilt. That’s heavy. When her face appears in the clouds at the end like Mufasa, it’s a confirmation of generational rest. That’s an arc that’s more fulfilling than being any love interest that would be discarded later.
As soon as it got rolling, I said to my wife that this was going to go one of two ways: Van Helsing will learn that his organization is not as righteous as he believed them to be, manipulating him to eliminate threats to the organization’s standing rather than threats to humanity; or Dracula and Van Helsing have a personal connection that hasn’t been fully examined. Dear reader, it went in both directions because Sommers is slapping so many plot elements to make this movie feel full to bursting like a bloated tick. There’s ideas stacked upon ideas here, references and unexplored plot points for an untapped universe (vampires started werewolves?). An hour in, all of Dracula’s bats, a.k.a. his children have been slain, and you may erroneously think the movie is over. Well, there’s a whole other castle to explore with even more baby bats to kill. The last hour operates on pure video game mechanics of, go here, grab this item, battle this mini-boss. There’s definitely a level of redundancy and a “more is more” kitchen sink excess philosophy, but the bombast is part of his general appeal. There’s a touch of Sam Raimi here, a touch of Michael Bay; schlock with sheen. Maybe it was my nostalgia goggles, or maybe I was just attuning to Sommers’ wavelength, but the movie worked for me much better in 2024 as I was now charmed by its goofball sensibilities and less irritated by its over-plotted script.
You feel the admirable passion that Sommers has for this universe, adopting stylish pastiches to celebrate the older movies and lore, but definitely bringing his more modern sensibilities to the forefront. There’s a certain chaotic energy that animates Sommers big movies, bringing these classic characters together to run amok and crash into each other. That little kid’s imagination given the whole sandbox to play in can be enviable and lively, and it can also lead into unexpected directions that unexpectedly go nowhere. The incorporation of Frankenstein’s monster (Shuler Hensely) is more a plot device than a thoughtful character to bring to the team. He’s the magical MacGuffin both sides are fighting to claim for their own. Van Helsing’s major crime is trying too much and being too straight-laced about its silly. It’s not winking to the audience, it’s not self-commenting on its absurdities, it’s just living them lavishly. In 2004, I couldn’t appreciate that and this movie, and now I can find a place in my heart for such fun.
My original review in 2004 is scathing, with ready-to-blurb snark trying to communicate the intensity of my distaste. The line that Sommers is “gorging on a trough of special effects and vomiting the results onto the big screen” sticks with me. I’m surprised I restrained myself from making a “Van Helsing sucks” comment. Several of my criticisms about the acting, the confusing rules, the convoluted storytelling are entirely valid, but they just don’t bother me enough twenty years later. I can relax and enjoy the movie because it is a mess. That doesn’t mean every flawed movie deserves kindly dismissing its faults if it doesn’t aspire to anything other than mass entertainment. Big movies for big audiences can still be big bad. I think Van Helsing’s appeal is how sloppy it is and how excessive every element plays. In another universe, a… “dark universe” to borrow a phrase that came to me for no reason, this could have kicked off the interconnected Universal monster movies (any reference to Egyptian mummies is absent, implying perhaps that Sommers earlier movies exist in a shared world). It was not to be, and Sommers’ career has never been the same since, which is a real shame. The blockbuster space needs a filmmaker like Sommers, a man nimble enough to juggle tones and childlike glee with darker humor. Come back, Stephen Sommers, and maybe try your hand at the Creature From the Black Lagoon while you’re at it.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Hellboy (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released April 2, 2004:
Guillermo del Toro loves things that go bump in the night. The Mexican born writer/director has shown prowess at slimy, spooky creatures with Cronos and 1997’s Mimic. He helmed the 2002 sequel to Blade, which had super vampires whose mouths would open up into four sections with rows of chattering teeth. The man sure loves his movie monsters. del Toro also loved Mike Mignola’s cult comic book Hellboy enough to turn down directing Harry Potter 3 and Blade 3 to ensure he could bring Hellboy to the big screen. Was it worth the sacrifice?
Let me just explain to you the villains of this movie as an example of how ridiculously stupid Hellboy is. The villains are … Nazis. Yes, the tried and true villains everyone can hate – Nazis. But these ain’t yo’ daddy’s Nazis; they’re immortal and led by zombie Rasputin (yes, the Rasputin). They all wish to puncture a hole into another dimension. What’s in this alternate dimension? Why nothing except for a giant floating spaceship that houses, I kid you not, the Seven Gods of Chaos, which all happen to be gigantic space squids. Why would anyone create a universe that has nothing but the imprisoned gods of evil? That seems awfully precarious. How exactly are giant squids going to take over the industrialized, nuclear-age world? Shoot ink at everyone? Sorry, space ink?
Let me not forget a Nazi assassin and his handy dandy arm-length blades. This assassin is also 100 years old and his body is filled entirely with sand. He winds himself up like a big clock. But if his body is filled completely with sand how can the clock gears work inside? You see what the normal audience member has to deal with? Plus these are just the villains, there’s a whole plot left to toil over as well.
The story revolves around a hulking, red demon named Hellboy (veteran character actor Ron Perlman). Hellboy escaped the space squid dimension in the 1940s when the Nazis unsuccessfully tried to open a dimensional hole large enough for your everyday on-the-go space squid. Now, Hellboy is an elite soldier for the government’s Bureau of Paranormal Research. He fights the creepy crawlies. He has to deal with a wide-eyed rookie, the watch of his “father” (John Hurt) and an attempt to rekindle a romance with a mentally troubled fire starter (Selma Blair). Oh yeah, and all the Nazi/Rasputin/space squid stuff mentioned before.
Perlman is really the only redeeming thing about this movie. The makeup is impressive, and he gives an enjoyably droll performance as a man who fights monsters with the same ho-hum-ness as a plumber reacts to clogged sinks. The rest of the acting runs the gamut of either being too serious (I’m looking at you Blair) or just too over-the-top silly (I’m looking at you, league of villains).
Hellboy is strung together with bizarre inanities, flat one-liners, heavy Catholic imagery, conflicting logic and contradictions, ridiculous villains, painful comic relief, half-baked romance and frustratingly ever-changing plot devices.
Watching Hellboy is like playing tag with a kid that keeps making up new rules as he goes (“You can’t tag me; I have an invisibility shield!”), and after a while you lose any interest. Late in the film, the Nazis will all of a sudden decide not to be immortal, and at a very inopportune time. Why? How? I don’t know. Hellboy also gets sudden new powers for some reason. Like he can bring people back to life by whispering otherworldly threats in their ears. For some reason nobody’s clothes burn when they’re set on fire.
Not only does Hellboy frustrate by changing the rules of its world arbitrarily, it will also frustrate out of sheer uninhibited stupidity. How come characters can’t hear or see a pendulum the size of the Chrysler building? How come during a vision of the apocalypse we see a newspaper that actually had the time and staff, during the Apocalypse, to print an issue that reads, “APOCALYPSE”? Why doesn’t Blair use her pyro superpowers immediately to vanquish all the H.P. Lovecraft creatures instead of letting Hellboy foolishly wrestle with them all? The gaping holes in Hellboy are large enough to squeeze a gigantic space squid through.
All this frustration and insanity might have been moot if the action sequences were somewhat thrilling. Sadly, they are not. del Toro’s action sequences seldom matter. There’s such little consequence of what’s going on that the action becomes stiff and lifeless. The first time we see Hellboy chase a creature through city streets it’s a fun experience, but soon the novelty wears off. The overuse of CGI wears down the audience, and after the third or fourth time we watch Hellboy battle the same monster, the audience is ready to go to sleep. There’s little entertainment in the film’s action sequences but just as much frustration and stupidity.
I have never watched a film that induced more eye rolls, shoulder shrugs, raised eyebrows, pained and confused glances and mutters of, “What the hell (boy)?” Comic book aficionados may enjoy the fruits of Hellboy but general audiences will simply shrug. I’m amazed that the majority of film critics seem to think positively about this movie. Maybe I’m the last sane person in an insane world but Hellboy is one of the worst films of the year and one of the craziest films you could ever hope to see in a lifetime.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
When I first saw 2004’s Hellboy, toward the tail end of my undergraduate years that April, I had no real familiarity with the character and went in with my pal, and fellow college newspaper entertainment critic Dan Hille. I went in a blank slate to the grumbling demonic lug created by Mike Mignola. To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement in my original review. I had an extremely hard time gelling with the world and finding some firm internal logic, and my general astonishment colored every inch of that incredulous review from a snarky 22-year-old soon-to-be college grad. Twenty years later, we have a sequel, reboot, and a series of animated shorts and feature-length films, so the character is much better known today than back in 2004. I also think its occult-heavy, Lovecraftian world-building has also been further established through mainstream horror and science fiction projects. So, in 2024, I’m more familiar with the title character, the cultural connections and background, and especially Guilermo del Toro as a filmmaker, and I’m still left unmoved by this initial pitch to the character and his weird world.
It took del Toro and company years to get this movie made as the big studios lacked faith in the material, in Ron Perlamn as the lead, and in superhero and comic book properties period. This really was its own superhero story with outlandish villains, oversized heroes burdened with secrecy, shame, and guilt, and heavy themes reaching into religion and determinism. The concept of an underground agency of monsters to fight monsters is a good starting point for stories, and Perlman brings the right degree of curmudgeon charm to the outcast character who might become the ultimate hero of the world or its instrument of doom. The iconography of a demon trying to be a good guy provides a fun sense of irony, as well as a natural point of conflict as the wider world would have trouble seeing past the red skin, forked tail, and big curved horns. It makes me think of the gut-punch reveal from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End where the benevolent aliens look exactly like the common visualization of a hooved and horned demon. The starting point for Hellboy has potential. However, it’s the rest that ultimately lost me.
Secret agencies and hidden conspiracies working behind the scene need to, themselves, be interesting. Think of the Men in Black and their assortment of goodies and agents. With the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), I expect more from the supporting characters and what they can unlock about our understanding of the world and the unknown. There really are only two super-powered supporting players, with Doug Jones playing Abe Sapian, a variation on the Creature from the Black Lagoon gillman, and Selma Blair as a pyrokinetic woman who checks herself into mental asylums to protect others. Both of these characters have possibility and are fellow outcasts like Hellboy, but neither feels sufficiently fleshed out and incorporated into this story. Because of Abe’s scenic limitations of being in water, he serves as more of a taste of “the world world” and narrative device. He’s not even involved in the entire final act of labyrinth misadventures. With Blair’s unstable pyro, her character is relegated to a tormented love interest for Hellboy to save, get jealous, and also save again through even more ludicrous means. For a secret agency, it all feels a little too small.
The biggest side character is John Myers (Rupert Evans, The Man in the High Castle), invented for the movie to be the audience’s entry point into learning more of this strange land of strange creatures. He’s a total bore, and he also doesn’t factor much more into the story than being a living reaction shot. He has one significant moment in the climax, and that’s simply telling Hellboy to remember who he is, ultimately convincing the big man to turn back from his destiny of enabling the apocalypse. Why do we need this character? Can’t another super-powered creature serve this same purpose? Why not Blair’s love interest figure, which would then present more attention on beginning that romantic connection between her and Hellboy? There’s a reason in X-Men that we followed a mutant to learn about other mutants and not some boring human. John Myers isn’t even included in the 2008 sequel, The Golden Army, because by that point he had served his only purpose of introducing us to a new world and being a benign romantic foil.
In a story with literal living Nazis brought to life through the magic of anti-Semitic clockwork, I’m dumbfounded why so much of the movie is watching Hellboy fight these boring lizard creatures with tongue tentacles. I appreciate the emphasis on practical effects and the reality that it’s a bunch of stunt performers in monster suits rather than complete CGI. The movie is another love letter of del Toro’s to his influences. His affection for the monsters and outsiders is apparent in every movie going back to his first, 1993’s Cronos. It’s too bad then that the primary opponent are these rudimentary lizard monsters that feel like the kind of easily disposable pawns you would see heroes fighting in other superhero spectacle. They’re faceless, and the fact they can regenerate and duplicate upon death doesn’t make them more formidable, only makes them more depressing as they can’t be easily rid of. If you’re going to give me giant space squids in an alternate dimension, then give me the giant space squids. If you’re going to give me Nazi zombies led by Rasputin, then give me that crazy mess. Don’t confine these potentially interesting villains to the opening and closing only. I will also say the ending is still a rather sizable letdown as far as how formidable these evil space squid gods might prove in a world of explosive devices and a modern military with a practical blank check for its budget.
Fun fact, at the time of its release, some theaters were so worried about playing a movie with “hell” in the title during Easter weekend, and coming off the ongoing success of The Passion of the Christ that brought in more conservative ticket-buyers, they decided to re-title it “Helloboy” on their theater marquis. I find this absolutely hilarious.
Hellboy has some points of interest, as del Toro was still fine-tuning his brand of fantasy-horror into a more mass-appealing conduit. It’s got terrific makeup effects and some fun ideas, and it’s also certifiably insane. It threw me for a loop back in 2004, and I just couldn’t process this level of hyper absurd elements jumbled together, and it still makes for a bumpy viewing. I enjoyed the 2008 sequel much more, which took more of a dark fantasy bent, and I wonder if I was more accepting of that realm of material than I was for Lovecraftian sci-fi nonsense. del Toro has learned from the Hellboy experience, becoming something of a masterful chameleon. He delivered one of the best kaiju action movies of all time that made me feel like a giddy kid. He created a haunting fairy tale timed to the Spanish Civil War. He created a charming romantic fable where a woman falls in love with a fish and it won an Oscar for Best Picture and he won Best Director. He created one of the most visually impressive stop-motion animated movies of all time that can make me cry like a baby and deservedly won another Oscar. Next up, he’s got another stop-motion animated movie and another creature feature, a remake of Frankenstein. Through his versatility, creative consistency, and inherent ability to find human drama in the most peculiar places, I’ll see any movie that del Toro decides to devote his worthy attention towards. Hellboy though? I’ve seen it twice now, and I think I can leave it at that. I’ll upgrade my earlier ranking but not too higher, Hoo boy is that 2004 review a fun read.
Re-View Grade: C
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Jersey Girl (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released March 25, 2004:
Writer/director Kevin Smith (Dogma) takes a stab at family friendly territory with the story of Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck), a music publicist who must give up the glamour of the big city to realize the realities of single fatherhood. Despite brief J. Lo involvement, Jersey Girl is by no means Gigli 2: Electric Boogaloo. Alternating between edgy humor and sweet family melodrama, Smith shows a growing sense of maturity. Liv Tyler stars as Maya, a liberated video store clerk and Ollie’’s real love interest. Tyler and Affleck have terrific chemistry and their scenes together are a playful highlight. The real star of Jersey Girl is nine-year-old Raquel Castro, who plays Ollie’’s daughter. Castro is delightful and her cherubic smile can light up the screen. Smith deals heavily with familiar clichés (how many films recently end with some parent rushing to their child’’s theatrical production?), but at least they seem to be clichés and elements that Smith feels are worth something. Much cute kiddie stuff can be expected, but the strength of Jersey Girl is the earnest appeal of the characters. Some sequences are laugh-out-loud funny (like Affleck discovering his daughter and a neighbor boy engaging in “the time-honored game of “doctor””), but there are just as many small character beats that could have you feeling some emotion. A late exchange between Ollie and his father (George Carlin) is heartwarming, as is the final image of the movie, a father and daughter embracing and swaying to music. Jersey Girl proves to be a sweetly enjoyable date movie from one of the most unlikely sources.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
When I started putting together my list of 2004 movies to re-watch for this year’s slate, my wife was not pregnant. We had been trying for a year and experienced some heartbreaking setbacks, but now, as I write my review of Jersey Girl, my reality is that my wife is indeed pregnant, and we’re expecting a baby this October and very excited. As you can expect, I’m also nervous. Now this movie about the changes of fatherhood has significantly more meaning for me personally.
In 2004, I was but a 22-year-old soon-to-be college graduate but also a devotee of writer/director Kevin Smith since my teenage years of discovering movies in the oh-so-exciting go-go decade of 1990s independent film. This was supposed to be Smith’s career pivot, as he’d reportedly closed the book on his View Askew universe of crude comedies and stoner hi-jinks with 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back. Smith had become a parent in 1999 and, naturally, this altered the kinds of stories he wanted to tell. Although this didn’t last too long. In 2004, America was sick of Bennifer 1.0 and Jersey Girl was the second movie in less than a year pairing real-life couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. The stink from 2003’s Gigli, and the tabloid overexposure, had tamped down the country’s demand for more Bennifer, so Miramax removed all publicity of Lopez from the movie, pushed the release date back half a year, and even publicly revealed that Lopez’s character dies in childbirth in the first ten minutes. Even with its relatively modest budget for a studio film, Jersey Girl under-performed, critics lambasted it, and Smith returned to his vulgar adult comedy playground with 2006’s Clerks II, the sequel to where it all began. With the occasional stop into horror, Smith has stayed in his own insular world and only gotten more insular with sequels to his early comedies for his ever-shrinking fandom.
More so than any other movie, Jersey Girl is the outlier, the oddity, the path not taken. Watching it again in 2024, I’m more forgiving of this outlier even if it proves harder to love. Much of this is likely my own relatability with the main character’s plight, a New York City workaholic publicist Ollie Trinkie (Affleck) who loses everything in a short window of time, namely his high-profile city job and his wife Gertrude (Lopez). Now he’s back living with his father Bart (George Carlin) in New Jersey and raising a little girl Gertie (Raquel Castro) on his own. It’s not a revolutionary film concept, a selfish adult takes on the responsibility of another and changes their perception of themself and the world. In a way, it likely happens to every new parent, or I would hope, a paradigm shift of perspective. The insights that Jersey Girl offers about parenthood and priorities are nothing new but that doesn’t mean they are bad or not worthwhile. Without the context of Smith’s tonal pivot, Jersey Girl would likely be forgotten, more than it already has been to history. It’s Smith’s spin on the family movie cliches we’ve seen before, and that means there’s a limit to how much further he can take the overly familiar.
It’s a little deflating to watch an artist known for his imagination and vocabulary utilizing the building blocks of maudlin family movies for his new story. Even with a different storyteller, they are still the same recognizable pieces seen before in hundreds of other feel-good movies about parents learning that children are more important than that big meeting or promotion. Of course reducing everything down in life is reductive, and maybe that big meeting could allow the parent to be more present for their kid, provide a better life being neglected, but whenever you set up the climactic choice between family and career, family always wins. Maybe David Wain (They Came Together) is the kind of subversive genre artist who could send up these age-old cliches and end with the workaholic parent choosing their selfish career. Regardless, the movie’s strengths are its sincerity rather than ironic detachment. It would be hard to make this kind of movie from a cynical smart-alecky approach, and Jersey Girl reveals what any View Askew fan has long known, that deep down at heart Smith is a big softie. It’s more apparent nowadays with Smith’s recent output of increasingly sentimental movies about relationships, as well as Smith’s copious social media posts showcasing his torrent of tears in response to a movie or TV show (as a man who frequently cries from movies and TV, this is no affront to me). Smith wanted to tell a personal story of his own life changes through the familiar family movie vehicle, and while it doesn’t entirely stretch beyond its copious influences, it’s still singing true to Smith’s sincerity.
This is far from the disaster many have made it out to be in the past twenty years. Lopez is really good in her brief opening appearance with a natural radiant charm that makes you mourn her absence just like Ollie. Liv Tyler (Armageddon reunion) shows up midway through as Maya, a sexually progressive video store clerk who becomes the next love interest for our widower. When she discovers, to Ollie’s embarrassment, that he hasn’t had sex for seven years, the entire time after his wife’s passing, she takes it upon herself to help the guy out with some charitable casual sex. The scene is funny and finally makes use of a setup Smith has taken time with prior, Gertie not flushing the toilet after use (something I can already regrettably relate to raising children). When his daughter comes home early, Ollie and Maya hide in the shower, and it appears they have gotten away with it, except Gertie finally remembers to flush the toilet, sending a burst of hot water that causes Maya to screech and reveal their half-naked tryst. From there, little Gertie sits them both down, reminiscent of what Ollie did with her and a friend when he caught them playing “doctor,” and she squares her gaze and intones, very maturely: “What are your intentions with my father?” Even the big climactic event, the children’s musical performance the parent can’t miss lest they break their child’s heart, gets a little edge when Gertie and her family perform the throat-slitting/pie-making number from Sweeney Todd. There’s a terrific exchange between Ollie and Will Smith all about the changing dynamic of fatherhood, what they do for their kids, and how rewarding it proves, and having Smith be your ace-in-the-hole is great.
It would be neglectful of me to forget the postscript that, nearly twenty years after the demise of their engagement, that Affleck and Lopez reunited and married in 2022. We’re in the current realm of Bennifer 2.0 (unless your version of Bennifer 2.0 was when he married Jennifer Garner, but I’ll let you decide if this era is 2.0 or 3.0) and Lopez has released a companion documentary to her 2024 visual album (a.k.a. collection of music videos) that features her relationship with Affleck, and it’s called The Greatest Love Story Never Told, and it’s gotten good reviews. Also of note, Castro grew up into a budding pop idol and appeared on The Voice and Empire.
There are things that work here, enough that Jersey Girl might honestly age better than the majority of Smith’s rude and crude comedies (see: re-reviews for Dogma and Strike Back, and Reboot). It will never garner the love of Smith’s more successful movies, but it doesn’t deserve any reputation as a forgotten stepchild among Smith’s oeuvre, especially when you consider the man also has Yoga Hosiers on that resume. In 2004, I referred to Jersey Girl as a “sweetly enjoyable date movie,” and this still stands twenty years later. I’m a little softer in several ways and more forgiving as an adult cinephile, and more welcome to genuine acts of sincerity, so the winning moments of the movie still hit their mark for me. I write this as my wife is still in her first trimester, and while the due date seems so far away I know it will rush by, and then I, like Ollie, will be juggling my life as I knew it with my life as I now know it (you better believe the scene where he loses his spouse in childbirth hit me harder as a new intrusive nightmare to occupy my mind). Jersey Girl isn’t anything new or special, but it was special for Smith, and he finds ways to make you understand what that means for him, and what it might mean for you. I’ll take that.
Re-View Grade: B-
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released March 19, 2004:
No other movie this year captured the possibility of film like Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s enigmatic collaboration. Eternal Sunshine was a mind-bending philosophical excursion that also ended up being one of the most nakedly realistic romances of all time. Joel (Jim Carrey restrained) embarks on having his memories erased involving the painful breakup of Clementine (Kate Winslet, wonderful), an impulsive woman whose vibrant hair changes as much as her moods. As Joel revisits his memories, they fade and die. He starts to fall in love with her all over again and tries to have the process stop. This labyrinth of a movie gets so many details right, from the weird physics of dreams to the small, tender moments of love and relationships. I see something new and marvelous every time I watch Eternal Sunshine, and the fact that it’s caught on with audiences (it was nominated for Favorite Movie by the People’s friggin’ Choice Awards) reaffirms its insights into memory and love. I never would have thought we’d get the perfect romance for the new millennium from Kaufman. This is a beautiful, dizzingly complex, elegant romance caked in visual grandeur, and it will be just as special in 5 years as it will be in 50, that is if monkeys don’t evolve and take over by then (it will happen).
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned;”
-Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717)
“Go ahead and break my heart, that’s fine
So unkind
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Oh, love is blind
Why am I missin’ you tonight?
Was it all a lie?”
-Kelly Clarkson, Mine (2023)
This one was always going to be special. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not just one of my favorite movies, it’s one of those movies that occupies the place of Important Formative Art. It’s a movie that connected with me but it’s also one that profoundly affected me and changed me, that inspired me in my own creative ventures. With its elevated place in my memory, I’ll also admit that there was some mild trepidation about returning to it and having it not measure up to the impact it had all those twenty years ago. It’s impossible to recreate that first experience or to chase after it, but you hope that the art we consider great still has resonance over time. This happened before when I revisited 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, a movie that gobsmacked me in my youth, had such innate power and fascination, and had lessened over the decades. It was still good art but it wasn’t quite the same, and there’s a little tinge of disappointment that lingers.
When I saw the movie for the first time it was at a promotional screening. I was a senior in college and had dyed my hair bright red for the second time. After marveling over my first encounter with 1999’s Run Lola Run, I was determined to have hair like the titular Lola. My parents were hesitant and set parameters, like certain grade achievements, and I met them all. Afterwards they had nothing left to quibble so I dyed my hair red, as well as other colors, my sophomore year and then again my senior year. At the screening, a publicist for the studio asked if I wanted to compete for a prize. I demurred but then she came back and asked again, and sensing something to my advantage, I accepted. It turns out the pre-show contest was a Clementine (Kate Winslet) look alike contest and my only competition was a teen girl with one light swath of blue hair. The audience voted and I won in a landslide and was given a gift basket of official Eternal Sunshine merchandise that included the CD soundtrack and a bright orange hooded sweatshirt modeled after the one Clem wears in the movie. That sweatshirt quickly became one of my favorite items of clothing, something special that nobody else had from a movie I adored. I wore it everywhere and it became a comfort and a confidence builder. Back during my initial courtship with my wife, in the winter months of 2020, she held onto the orange hoodie as a memento to wear and think of me during our time apart. She said it even smelled like me, which was a comfort. It had meaning for us, and we cherished it. I had to marry her, of course, to ensure I’d eventually get the sweatshirt back in my possession (I kid).
The lessons of Eternal Sunshine run deep for me. On the surface it’s a breakup movie about an impulsive woman, Clem, deciding to erase her memories of her now ex-boyfriend Joel (Jim Carrey). Out of spite, he elects to have the same procedure, and from there we jump in and out of Joel’s head as a subconscious avatar experiences their relationship but in reverse. It’s the bad memories, the hurt and ache of a relationship nearing or past its end, but as each memory degrades and Joel goes further into the past, he discovers that there are actually plenty of enjoyable memories through those good times, the elation and discovery, the connections and development of love, that he doesn’t want to lose. He tries to fight against the procedure but it becomes a losing battle, and so he gets to ride shotgun in his cerebellum as this woman vanishes from his life. What began out of spite and heartache ends in mourning and self-reflection.
At its heart, the movie is asking us to reflect upon the importance of our personal experiences and how they shape us into the people that we are. This includes the ones that cause us pain and regret. The human experience is not one wholly given to happiness, unfortunately, but there are lessons to be had in the scars and pain of our individual pasts. I’m not saying that every point of discomfort or pain is worthwhile, as there are many victims who would say otherwise, but we are the sum total of our experiences, good and bad. With enough distance, wisdom can be gained, and perhaps those events that felt so raw and unending and terrible eventually put us on the path of becoming the person you are today. Now, of course, maybe you don’t like the person you are now, but that doesn’t mean you’re also a prisoner to your past and doomed to dwell in misery.
After my divorce from my previous wife in 2012, I wrote a sci-fi screenplay following some of the same themes from Eternal Sunshine. It was about two dueling time travelers trying to outsmart one another, one hired to ensure a romantic couple never got together and one hired to make sure that they had. The characters represented different viewpoints, one arguing that people are the total of their experiences and the other arguing people should be capable of choosing what experiences they want ultimately as formative. Naturally, through twists and turns, the one time traveler learns a lesson about “living in the now,” to stop literally living in the past and trying to correct other people’s perceived mistakes, and that our experiences, and our heartache, can be valuable in putting us into position to being the people we want or living the lives we seek. It shouldn’t be too hard to see that I was working through my own feelings with this creative venture. It got some attention within the industry and I dearly hope one day it can be made into a real movie. It’s one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written and I’m quite proud of it. It wouldn’t exist without Eternal Sunshine making its mark on me all those years ago.
It’s an amazing collaboration between director Michel Gondry and the brilliant mind of Charlie Kaufman. The whimsical, hardscrabble DIY-style of Gondry’s visuals masterfully keeps the viewer on our toes, as Joel’s memories begin vanishing and collapsing upon one another in visually inventive and memorable ways. There’s moments like Joel, after finding Clem once she’s erased her memory of him, and he storms off while row after row of lights shuts off, dooming this memory to the inky void. There’s one moment where he’s walking through a street and with every camera pan more details from the store exteriors vanish. A similar moment occurs through a store aisle where all the paperbacks become blank covers. It’s a consistent visual inventiveness to communicate the fraying memories and mind of Joel, which becomes its own playground that allows us to better understand him. The score by Jon Brion (Magnolia) is also a significant addition, constantly finding unique and chirpy sounds to provide a sense of earned melancholy. By experiencing their relationship backwards, it allows us to have a sense of discovery about the relationship. This is also aided by Kaufman’s sleight-of-hand structure, with the opening sequence misleadingly the beginning of their relationship when it’s actually their second first time meeting one another. The pointed details of relationships, both on the rise and decline, feel so achingly authentic, and the characters have more depth than they might appear on the surface. Joel is far more than a hopeless romantic. Clem is far more than some Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term coined for 2005’s Elizabethtown. She tells Joel that she’s not some concept, she’s not here to complete his life and add excitement; she’s just a messed up girl looking for her own peace of mind and she doesn’t promise to be the answer for any wounded romantic soul.
The very end is such a unique combination of feelings. After Mary (Kirsten Dunst) discovers that she’s previously had her memories of an affair with her boss erased, she takes it upon herself to mail every client their files so that they too know the truth. Joel and Clem must suffer listening to their recorded interviews where they are viciously attacking one another, like Clem declaring Joel to be insufferably boring who puts her on edge, and Joel accuses her of using sex to get people to like her. Both are hurt by the accusations, both shake them off as being inaccurate, and yet it really is them saying these things, recorded proof about the ruination of their relationship. Would getting together be doomed to eventually repeat these same complaints? Clem walks off and Joel chases after her and tells her not to go. Teary-eyed, she warns that she’ll grow bored of him and resentful because that’s what she does, and she’ll become insufferable to him. And then Joel says, “Okay,” an acceptance that perhaps they may repeat their previous doomed path, maybe it’s inevitable, but maybe it also isn’t, and it’s worth it to try all the same. Maybe we’re not destined to repeat our same mistakes. Then it ends on a shot of our couple frolicing in the snow, the descending white beginning to blot out the screen, serving as a blank slate. It’s simultaneously a hopeful and pessimistic ending, a beautifully nuanced conclusion to a movie exploring the human condition.
Winslet received an Oscar nomination for her sprightly performance, and deservedly so, but it’s Carrey that really surprises. He had already begun to stretch his dramatic acting muscles before in the 1998 masterpiece The Truman Show and the far-from-masterpiece 2001 film The Majestic. He’s so restrained in this movie, perfectly capturing the awkwardness and passive aggressive irritability of the character, a man who views his life as too ordinary to be worth sharing. Clem begs him to share himself since she’s an open book but he’s more mercurial. She wants to get to know him better but to Joel there’s a question of whether or not he has anything worthwhile getting to know. Carrey sheds all his natural charisma to really bring this character to life. It’s one of his best performances because he’s truly devoted to playing a character, not aggressively obnoxious Method devotion like in 1999’s Man on the Moon.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a messy, enlightening, profound, playful, poignant, and mesmerizing movie. A perfect collaboration between artists with unique creative perspectives. I see something new every time I watch it, and it’s already changed my life in different ways. I used to see myself as Joel when I was younger, but then I grew to see him as self-pitying and someone who too often sets himself up for failure by being too guarded and insular. It’s a reminder that our cherished relationships remain that way by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and open. We are all capable and deserving of love.
Re-View Grade: A
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The Passion of the Christ (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released February 25, 2004:
The Passion of the Christ is a retelling of the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ’s life (perhaps you’ve heard of him?). In these final hours we witness his betrayal at the hands of Judas, his trial by Jewish leaders, his sentencing by Pontius Pilate, his subsequent whippings and torture and finally his crucifixion. Throughout the film Jesus is tempted by Satan, who is pictured as a pasty figure in a black hood (kind of resembling Jeremy Irons from The Time Machine if anyone can remember). The Passion spares no expense to stage the most authentic portrayal of what Jesus of Nazareth endured in his final 12 hours of life.
For all the hullabaloo about being the most controversial film in years (and forgive me for even using the term “hullabaloo”), I can’t help but feel a smidgen of disappointment about the final product. The Passion is aptly passionate and full of striking images, beautiful photography and production values, and stirring performances all set to a rousing score. But what makes The Passion disappointing to me is the characters. You see, Mel Gibson’s epic does not devote any time to fleshing out the central characters. They are merely ciphers and the audience is expected to plug their feelings and opinions into these walking, bleeding symbols to give them life. Now, you could argue this is what religion is all about, but as far as a movie’s story goes it is weak. The Passion turns into a well-meaning and slick spectacle where character is not an issue. And as a spectacle The Passion is first-rate; the production is amazing and the violence is graphic and gasp-inducing. Do I think the majority of people will leave the theater moved and satisfied? Yes I do. But I can’t stop this nagging concern that The Passion was devoid of character and tried covering it up with enough violence to possibly twist its message into a Sunday school snuff film.
For my money, the best Biblical film is Martin Scorsese’s 1987 The Last Temptation of Christ (also a film mired in controversy). Last Temptation, unlike Gibson’s spectacle, was all about Jesus as a character and not simply as a physical martyr. Scorsese’s film dealt with a Christ consumed by doubt and fear and the frailties of being human. But the best part is the final 20 minutes when Jesus is tempted, by Satan, to step down from the cross and live out a normal life. Jesus walks away from the cross, marries Mary Magdalene, fathers children (this is where the controversy stemmed from but they were married) and dies at an old age. Jesus is then confronted by his aging apostles who chastise him for not living up to what he was supposed to do to save mankind. Jesus wakes up from the illusion and fulfills his mission and dies on the cross. Now, with the story of Last Temptation an audience has a greater appreciation for the sacrifice of Jesus because they witness his fears and they witness the normal life he forgoes to die for man’s sins. There is a sense of gravity about what Jesus is sacrificing.
With The Passion Gibson figures if he can build a sense of grand sacrifice by gruesomely portraying the tortures Jesus endured. Even if it is Jesus, and this may sound blasphemous, torturing a character to create sympathy and likeability is the weakest writing trick you can do. Yes Jesus suffered a lot, yes we should all be horrified and grateful, and yes people will likely be moved at the unrelenting violence he endured, but in regards to telling a story, I cannot feel as much for characters whose only characterization is their suffering. Sure, The Passion flashes back to some happier moments of Jesus’ life, which I like to call the Jesus Greatest Hits collection, but the movie does not show us who Jesus was, what he felt (beyond agonizing pain) or the turmoil he went through in finally deciding to give up his own life for people that despised him. The Passion is not about character but about spectacle.
So let’s talk about the violence now, shall we? Gibson’s camera lovingly lingers on the gut-churning, harrowing, merciless level of violence. But this is his only message. It’s like Gibson is standing behind the camera and saying to the audience, “You see what Jesus suffered? Do you feel bad now? FLAY HIM MORE! How about now?” What was only three sentences of description in the Gospels takes up ten minutes of flogging screen time. Mad Mel has the urge to scourge. After an insane amount of time spent watching Jesus get flayed and beaten the violence starts to not just kill whatever spiritual message Gibson may have had in mind, but the violence becomes the message. The Passion does give an audience a fair understanding of the physical torture Jesus was subjected to, but the movie does not display Christ as fully human, enjoying life and love, or fully divine. The only thing The Passion shows us about Jesus is that the son of God sure knew how to take a whuppin’. For Gibson, the violence is the message and the point is to witness what Jesus endured. Some would call that sadistic.
The actors all do a fine job and it’s impressive that everyones’ lines is in two dead languages (Latin and Aramaic, though for the life of me I can’t tell them apart). But the acting is limited because of the nature of the film. Had there been more moments of character the acting would come across better. As it stands, the acting in The Passion is relegated to looks of anguish or looks of horror, interspersed with weeping. Monica Bellucci (The Matrix sequels) really has nothing to do as Mary Magdalene but run around in the background a lot. Jim Caviezel (Frequency, Angel Eyes) gives everything he has in the mighty big shoes he tries to fill. It’s too bad that his Jesus spends most of the screen time being beaten, which kind of hampers his acting range.
Now let’s address the anti-Semitic concerns. The Passion does portray a handful of Jewish religious leaders as instigators for Jesus’ eventual crucifixion, but there are also Jewish leaders who denounce their actions and just as many people bemoaning the torture of Jesus as there are calling for it. Who really comes off looking bad are the Romans. Excluding the efforts to make Pilate look apprehensive, the Roman soldiers are always seen kicking, punching, whipping, spitting on Jesus and laughing manically with their yellow teeth.
And like I said before, most people will be extremely satisfied with the film because it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t have an opinion on Jesus. Gibson is counting on audiences to walk in and fill in the holes of the character so that The Passion is more affecting. Gibson’s film is worthy spectacle, and despite the vacuum of character I did get choked up four separate times, mostly involving Jesus and his mother. The Passion is a well-made and well-intentioned film that will hit the right notes for many. I just wish there were more to it than spectacle. I really do.
Nate’s Grade: C
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
In 2004, Mel Gibson made an R-rated foreign film that was two hours of savage brutality against Jesus, and it wound up being one of the biggest box-office hits of the decade and forged a trail for other Hollywood execs to chase after a “faith-based audience.” It could be said that this grisly movie gave the people what they wanted, and apparently what they wanted was to watch their messiah suffer physical feats that should have killed any mortal five times over. Twenty years later, The Passion of the Christ is still a curiosity, a movie with so much technical quality and devotion to a specific purpose, but that purpose is so narrow: make people feel bad. If you were being charitable, you could argue that the sacrifice of Jesus is felt stronger when every whipping, beating, scourging, and blood-letting is endured from the audience. Except I don’t believe this, because that assumes that more time spent on visual carnage equals more appreciation earned, as if our empathy has an equation. The emphasis on the death of Jesus feels like a telling insight into certain elements within mainstream American religious culture, where the focus is on violence and loss and less so the resurrection of Jesus, wherein the man conquers death and preaches forgiveness of sin for all mankind. It’s the preoccupation with grievance and brutish power over the helping of others different and less fortunate from ourselves. I’m not going to say the hard-core fans of The Passion of the Christ are valuing the wrong spiritual ideals, but it was this Jesus guy who did say everyone should love thy neighbor as thyself.
This is going to be a rarity for my twenty-year re-review series, but I agree almost one hundred percent with everything I wrote in 2004. I can’t really improve upon that analysis and my explanation for the faults of the movie and its spiritual shortcomings. Some of these lines are still terrific: “…Twist its message into a Sunday school snuff film,” “The only thing The Passion shows us about the Son of God is that he sure knew how to take a whippin’,” and, “Mad Mel has the urge to scourge.” More time is spent obsessing over the blood of Jesus than any of his words. I’m still debating the exact legacy of this movie besides as a harbinger of a wider Christian marketplace as well as Jim Caviezel’s own god complex. Gibson only directed two other movies after, 2006’s Apocalypto and 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge. His personal failings also became hard for many to ignore after his anti-semetic drunken ramblings and allegations of abuse, relegating him chiefly to direct-to-streaming (13 films from 2020-2023). In many ways, The Passion of the Christ represents Gibson at his height of powers within Hollywood, and it was accomplished outside the studio system who thought he was crazy, though he proved them right for different reasons.
Some strange Passion facts lost to history. 1) This movie actually killed a viewer. During the crucifixion scene, a man suffered a fatal heart attack and later died. Sure, the man’s genetics and life-style choices are more likely at fault here, but had this man not seen Gibson’s movie he might have survived or at least been in a better capacity to deal with his eventual heart attack symptoms. 2) Gibson attempted to re-edit the movie for a PG-13 theatrical re-release in 2005, trimming five minutes of some of the more gruesome violence, yet the MPAA still said the movie was keeping its R-rating. 3) During filming, Caviezel was literally struck by lightning. 4) A sequel has been in development for almost twenty years, confirmed by Gibson’s Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace in 2016. In 2023, Gibson revealed he has multiple versions of the sequel script in the works, including one that visits hell. Caveizel has predicted the possible sequel would be the “biggest film in history,” but this is the same guy who declared Donald Trump as the modern-day Noah, so maybe let’s not regard this guy too credibly with his opinions.
The challenge with any on-screen depiction of Jesus is fleshing him out as man and god. Only focusing on one obscures the complexity of characterization, denying filmgoers a more engaging examination of the key figure of Christianity. I’d still advise everyone to watch Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ for all the important elements that The Passion of the Christ lacks. This is a movie designed only for brutal spectacle and nothing more, and it’s just as tedious and empty now as it was twenty years ago. Apparently, Scorsese feels like he still has more to say on the subject and is planning another Jesus movie based on a 2016 book by Shūsaku Endō, the same author of the source material for Silence. While I would maintain that Scorsese has already made the greatest movie about Jesus, as well as the greatest movie about the exploration and challenge of reckoning with faith (2016’s Silence), who am I to deny one of our living legends another bite from the apple? It’ll certainly be more spiritually meaningful than watching an execution of Jesus for two miserable hours designed as enlightenment.
Re-Review Grade: C-
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The Butterfly Effect (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released January 23, 2004:
Notice: I found Ashton Kutcher, star of The Butterfly Effect, on a trip to buy dog food, and cordially asked him to write a review. This is what he sent me. It’’s totally him. I wouldn’’t make this stuff up. That would be dumb.
“So, like, this Nate guy asked me to do a review of my new awesomest movie, The Butterfly Effect. Dude, like anyone needs a review for the most awesomest movie ever. I mean, like, the term ‘awesomest movie ever’ should say, like, everything. The only thing possibly more awesome than The Butterfly Effect would be trucker hats …… or two chicks totally making out. And I only said ‘possibly more awesome,’ which doesn’’t mean it is more awesome, because, dude, like I said before, The Butterfly Effect is the most awesomest thing ever. You can’t dispute that. Don’t even try. I’m awesome!
Like, the story goes like this, man. I play this guy, like I know big stretch there, but he’s not the most awesome guy ever, which is what you’d be thinking since it’s the most awesomest movie ever. But no, he’s like this kid who blacks out and has this wickedly twisted childhood where he stars in his neighbor’s kiddie porn, has his dog set on fire, and, like, his dad is all crazy, or, like I like to say, insane in the ole’ membrane. Ha, I totally made that up right now. I’m awesome!
So, you’re like saying, ‘Dude, that movie sounds less than awesome. Yes, sir, I am having definite doubts about the awesomeness of this movie. Like, do I need to go to the movies to, like, feel bad? I got my parents to do that for me. That and school.’ Hey man, I’m there, I know what you feel. ‘Cause right when you are like, ‘Dude, when is Demi gonna’ show up playing his mom?’ I find these old journals of mine and, dude, use them to travel back in time. I know, the awesomeness has returned. And I use the journals to go back and try and punk time, man. I try and make things better and change the future but I like totally just make it worse. I know, double punk’d, man! I try and fix the life of this hot girl in the movie (she showed her boobs in that Road Trip movie, did you see that? That part where she shows her boobs, oh man … It is awesome) but things don’’t work out. Like she becomes a crack ho at one point. Dude, total punk’d. I’m awesome!
I should be taken as a serious actor. I didn’t hit my head on something and I grew a beard, what more do people need to know I got the goods? I mean, I don’t want to keep saying it but …… beard. C’mon! When actors want to be taken seriously they, like, grow beards. That’s why all those people in movies before 1970 (I know, it surprised me too that there were older movies) got awards and stuff. Beards, dude. Beards. When Billy Dee Shakespeare, like, invented acting, he totally imagined dudes, and chicks too, with beards. That’s why girls can’t be taken as serious actors, ‘cause they can’t grow beards. Ha. I’m awesome!
So, like, if you ever wondered what it would be like to see me, Ashton Kutcher, the most awesome man alive …who ever lived, no… the most awesome human being …-the most awesome thing …- ever, as a frat boy, or like, some poor dude with no arms, then you should see my new movie, The Butterfly Effect. After all, it is the most awesomest thing ever. That’s awesome. So, like, you people reading (is that what school is for?) should go see my movie. I’ll tell you why in two words: beard.”
Nate’s Grade: C+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
It’s hard to remember but there was a time where Ashton Kutcher was the king of the early 2000s universe. He had parlayed his excitable supporting character on a late 90s network sitcom into a successful movie career top-lining wild comedies, and he had also found success as a producer, bringing new life to the hidden camera prank TV show with his eponymous Punk’d where many of his celebrity friends would be victimized for the lols. The man even single handedly made goofy trucker hats a fashion mainstay. I know we haven’t seen much of the Kutch in a while, as he’s settled into his non-profit charities and being a family man, ceding the spotlight to his wife and former sitcom girlfriend, Mila Kunis. The Kutcher brand was stronger than ever at the time of The Butterfly Effect, enough so that Kutcher signing on as an executive producer was what finally got this widely read industry script to finally get made. You must view The Butterfly Effect as a point not just in Kutcher’s career but also in millennial edge-lord culture, the concept that anything dark is therefore compelling, and the more twisted the better. Re-watching the movie twenty years later, I wanted to laugh out loud at so many points because The Butterfly Effect is so serious while being so silly as it plumbs every depth of misery, both for its characters as well as any potential audience members still keeping track of the messy metaphysics.
Kutcher plays the adult version of Evan, a kid who has had quite a challenging upbringing to put it mildly. Mom (Melora Walters) is doing her best while Evan’s father is locked away in a mental asylum, and she’s worried her child might have inherited dad’s instability. He blacks out for extended periods and is found holding a knife or having drawn a horrible massacre at school, and even worse neighborhood tragedies (oh, I’ll get to all of them). A psychiatrist advises him to start journaling as a therapeutic means, and so he does, and when adult Evan reads his childhood journals, the words become blurry and he’s able to travel back in time to those exact moments. With this great power, adult Evan tries to right the wrongs of his life and those around him, but as all time travel stories are destined to discover, there are cruel unintended consequences to endure.
Watching this movie is like watching a checklist of events that producers thought would be dark and grisly and So Messed Up, but this movie is so self-serious that it could be a parody of what a moody teenager would think of as a “mature movie.” Let me just list some of the content the movie covers: the drunken dad next door (Eric Stoltz) is a pedophile who records his daughter and son and Evan in child porn, the kids put a firecracker in a mailbox that blows up killing a mother and her baby, an angry kid kidnaps Evan’s dog and ties him in a bag and literally sets the bag on fire killing the animal, lots of violence against young children including murder, attempted suicide, disturbing behavior in children including traumatic self-harm at school, prison rape, multiple mental asylums, disfigurement and disability, prostitution and addiction, and in the original ending, the one I re-watched, a fetus literally strangling itself with its own umbilical cord rather than being born. Wow. Just… wow. This movie is only two hours and it crams enough sundry melodrama and grimdark grist to fill out a month of the grimiest soap opera ever. Because of the sheer amount of disturbing content, every new provocative addition makes the movie’s tone teeter further and further into unintended self-parody. Once you’re starting to process the homegrown child pornographer, the movie throws animal cruelty at you, and so on. It’s not enough that Evan had a bad childhood of trauma, but does he have to experience all the traumas?
Much of the movie follows Evan’s morose quest to improve the life of his unrequited love, Kayleigh (Amy Smart as the adult version). He runs into her after several years apart and merely bringing up the past with her pedophile father filming the two of them propels her to kill herself off-screen. She’s literally introduced in one scene and then in the next she’s dead, and it’s all Evan’s fault, so says her angry brother via the answering machine clunkily informing us. Evan goes back and stops her dad from molesting her, so now dad only molests her brother Tommy instead, who Evan kills as an adult defending himself. He travels back in time and now her brother is dead and she’s become a heroin-addicted hooker and that won’t do. He travels back again and manages to improve the lives of Kayleigh, Tommy, and their friend Lenny, except in this timeline Lenny and Kayeligh are the romantic couple and Evan has no arms, having lost them in the childhood mailbox explosion. He travels back again and this time Kayleigh gets blown up as a child. Ultimately Evan concludes he cannot save her and have everything he wants, so he makes some form of sacrifice by the end; in the theatrical cut, young Evan upsets her so she chooses to live with her mother rather than her pedophile father, and in the director’s cut, he ensures Kayleigh will never meet him by killing himself in the womb (his mother reveals she’s had multiple miscarriages, leaving the impression other future siblings have done the same). I appreciate how the filmmakers have streamlined their convoluted time travel tale into a simple task of trying to get the girl, but it also becomes so overwrought that I wanted to shake my head and sigh.
These characters are put through an emotional and often physical grinder, so it’s hard not to feel sorry for them. I long felt the film’s contempt for Kayleigh ever since young Evan (a young Logan Lerman) tells her, “You don’t even know how beautiful you are,” like she’s so stupid to see the obviousness of his compliment. I think dark comedy is the best way to read the movie, laughing along the way as Evan fails time and again to improve the lives of everyone through his space-time interventions. He can save this kid but doom his mother to lung cancer. He can save this person but is locked away in prison. It’s a no-win scenario for Evan, so he decides it’s better if he was never born, negating all the possible good he’s done in his life, including maybe being a force that could keep Kayleight from living with her dad. Maybe not having that friend and an advocate push her into that decision doomed her to a life of molestation, so way to go Evan.
I kind of loathe the time travel method in this movie but at least it provides a limitation that works within the universe of The Butterfly Effect. He can only travel reading his journals, which means he’s stuck in whatever nightmare timeline he’s responsible for unless he can recapture some part of his childhood scribblings. Reading them aloud is also an unexpected source of dark comedy because it makes me question how forthcoming a child of trauma would be about writing down his experiences in simplistic shorthand (“So today Kaleigh wasn’t feeling so good. Her face blew up. I was sad”). I did like that this inherited disorder provides more mystery to his family line, a source of material not covered in either of the Butterfly Effect direct-to-DVD sequels unrelated to Evan’s troubled story. This is perhaps the second worst method of time travel I’ve found in the movies after 1980’s Somewhere in Time where Christopher Reeve uses the power of positive thinking to convince himself he’s in 1912, and lo and behold he shall be.
Watching this movie is like revisiting a Goth phase you had as a brooding teenager but have since considered a point of embarrassment (not that being Gothic is something to be ashamed of, simply that it was an overzealous step in asserting a misguided sense of what being a mature adult meant, generally disaffected and cynical and edgy for its own attention). The Butterfly Effect is an endless improv game of “yes and” where the proceedings only get worse. My original review in 2004 was one of my more unconventional reviews, and I just wanted to adopt my perception of the “Kutcher brand” persona of the era and make a bunch of dumb jokes, several of which I’m not too ashamed to admit still made me chuckle (“two words: beard.”). I’d lower my grade a tad but there is still a car-crash fascination of watching a movie try so transparently hard to be so twisted.
Re-View Grade: C
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Monster (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 24, 2003:
Monster follows the life of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron, now nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), Americas only known female serial killer. In the late 1980s, Wueros was a roadside prostitute flexing her muscles with Florida motorists. She describes hookin’ as the only things shes ever been good at. One day Wuornos has the full intention of taking her own life, but she meets 18-year-old Selby (Christina Ricci) at a lesbian bar and finds a companion. Driven by a growing hatred of men from sexual abuse, Wuorno’s starts killing her johns to try and establish a comfortable life for her and Selby.
Let’s not mince words; Theron gives one of the best performances I have ever seen in my life. Yes, that’s right. One of. The. Best. Performances. Ever. This is no exaggeration. I’m not just throwing out niceties. Theron is completely unrecognizable under a mass of facial prosthetics, 30 extra pounds, fake teeth and a total lack of eyebrows. But this is more than a hollow ploy to attract serious attention to the acting of a pretty face. Theron does more than simple imitation; she fully inhabits the skin of Aileen Wuornos. The closest comparison I can think of is Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in The Doors.
Theron is commanding, brave, distressing, ferocious, terrifying, brutal, stirring, mesmerizing and always captivating. It may be a cliché, but you really cannot take your eyes off of her. Her performance is that amazing. To say that Theron in Monster is an acting revelation is perhaps the understatement of the year.
With previous acting roles in Reindeer Games and The Cider House Rules, Theron is usually delegated to pretty girlfriend roles (who occasionally shows her breasts). Who in the world thought she had this kind of acting capability? I certainly did not. If Nicole Kidman can win an Oscar for putting on a fake nose and a so-so performance, surely Theron should win an Oscar for her absolute transformation of character and giving the performance of a lifetime.
With this being said, and most likely over said, Monster is by no means a perfect film. Minus the terrific central performance, Monster is more of an everyday profile of a grotesque personality. The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster. Some supporting characters, like Ricci’s narrow-minded Christian up bringers, are flat characters bordering on parody. The supporting characters are generally underwritten, especially the male roles that serve as mere cameos in a film dominated by sapphic love.
Monster is proof positive that human beings will never be phased out by advancing machinery when it comes to acting. Monster boasts one of the greatest acting achievements in recent cinematic history, but it also coasts on sharp cinematography and a moody and ambient score by BT (Go). Monster is a haunting film that you won’t want to blink for fear of taking your eyes off of Theron. She gives an unforgettable tour de force performance that will become legendary.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Monster was a revelation for Charlize Theron, an actress who until then had mostly been known for parts that asked that she be good looking and little else. Twenty years later, Theron is one of the best actresses working in Hollywood and it almost never happened without her breakthrough performance where she brought to startling life the horror of Aileen Wuornos’s tragic life and tragic desperation. When this movie came out originally in 2003, I doubt anyone but Theron’s closest friends suspected she was capable of a performance this raw and spellbinding, but that’s also a condemnation on all of us. How many other actresses out there could maybe rival the best of the best if they just had the right opportunity? How many actresses are stuck playing the same limited roles because that’s all they’re ever asked to do? How many actresses are wrongly assumed to be of limited talent simply because of their comely appearance? That isn’t to say there’s some hidden universal equation that the uglier you are the better at acting you have to be (though it sure has worked out for [insert your example of a conventionally unattractive actor here]), but this movie is a clear indication that too many actors are never given enough opportunities to shine.
Back in early 2004, I credited Theron’s performance as one of the best I’ve ever witnessed in my then-twenty-one years of moviegoing (although that number should be smaller considering I wasn’t keenly watching Scorsese as a baby). She is very good, but I’d like to claw back some of my rapturous words of praise now that we’ve seen twenty years of Theron acting excellence. Looking over her career, I might actually cite 2011’s Young Adult as her finest performance, and that one didn’t even nab an Oscar nomination (she’s since been nominated twice since, for 2005’s North Country and 2019’s Bombshell). The draw of the movie is the head-turning performance from Theron and she just disappears completely inside the skin of her subject. It’s hard to remember at times that this is Theron, thanks to the richness of her startling performance but also the accomplished makeup effects, which were not nominated. At every point, you feel the fire burning behind the stricken complexion of Theron, a fire that will eventually consume her and everything she loves. While highly compelling, this is not a performance of subtlety and restraint. This is a big performance, and the movie is often prone to making loud pronouncements about its subjects and pertinent themes. It’s loud, brash, and maybe for some it will seem a little too loud, a little too unsubtle, but it’s a movie that refuses to be ignored for good reason.
In my original review I raised some reservations with the rest of the movie, and I’m here to recant one of them. I wrote back in 2004, “The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster.” I’m positive that many will still cling to this same idea but oh boy have I come around in twenty years. By the time the movie is over, you wonder why more women haven’t just snapped and gone on killing sprees. Wuornos is indeed a victim. She’s responsible for terrible deeds but that doesn’t change the fact that she started as a victim and continued as one until put to death by the state of Florida in 2002. She was a sexual assault survivor, groomed into prostitution, and then trapped by a society that saw her as little other than trash, something to be pitied but ultimately forgotten. She comes of age as an adult thinking her only value is the fleeting moments of pleasure she can provide for men, and in the narration, we hear her dreams that one of these men who repeatedly tell her how pretty she is would take her away to another life, like a princess. Alas. It’s impossible to separate her past as a victim of predatory men from her actions when she turns on predatory men. Being forced into prostitution out of desperation is one of the definitions for sex slavery and trafficking. The movie does try to make her last few johns more ambiguous over whether or not they are “good people” and thus “deserving” of their fates, like a scale is being introduced and we’re doing the calculation whether Wuornos will strike (#NotAllMen, eh felas?). There’s a clear dark path where the murders get considerably worse. She begins by defending herself against a rapist, but by the end, it’s just a kind family man who picked her up without even the intention of having sex. We’re meant to see her transform into the titular monster, but I kept wondering about Aileen Wuornos as the societal stand-in, accounting for thousands of other women who lived and died under similar tragic circumstances.
I also found myself growing increasingly contemptuous of the love interest character played by Christina Ricci (Yellowjackets). When we’re introduced to Selby, she’s a wide-eyed naif testing her boundaries of comfort but clearly tapping into repressed homosexual feelings. Their relationship is meant to serve as the emotional rock for Wuornos, the reason that she’s acting more rash is because she’s trying to earn enough money for the two of them to run away together and build a new life. She is her motivation, but Selby is absolutely the worst. You can excuse some of her hemming and hawing about striking out on her own and leaving her controlling parents, as she’s fighting against repression as well as trepidation for starting out independently, but this lady becomes fully aware of the dangers and dehumanization that Aileen goes through to earn her meager amounts of money, and Selby encourages her to do so. Not just encourages her, Selby pressures her to do so, to get back out there and “provide” for her, knowing fully well what that means, knowing fully well how these men have treated Wournos, repeatedly abusing her. What are you doing to help things out, huh Selby? She’s embarrassed hanging around Wuornos around some other lesbian friends she just met, so she’s already looking to upgrade and move past her lover. By the end, as she’s trying to coax a confession of guilt from her girlfriend to save her own skin, Selby becomes just another user, taking what they want from Wuornos and discarding her when they’ve had their fill.
This was the directorial debut for Patty Jenkins, who also served as the sole credited screenwriter, and while the indie darling-to-franchise blockbuster pipeline has been alive and well in Hollywood, it was quite a surprising leap that her next movie after Monster was none other than 2017’s Wonder Woman. To go from this small character-driven true crime indie to leading the big screen solo outing for comics’ most famous female hero is quite a bizarre but impressive jump. Her only other feature credit is the much less heralded 2020 Wonder Woman sequel. She was attached to direct a Star Wars movie about fighter pilots but that seems to have gone into turnaround or just canceled. So is the way with Star Wars movies after 2019’s Rise of Skywalker. Just ask the Game of Thrones creators, Josh Trank, and Taika Watiti how that goes.
Monster is a phenomenal performance with a pretty okay movie wrapped around it in support. Twenty years later, Theron is still a monster you can’t take your eyes away from. It changed her career destiny and I think acts as an exemplar for two reasons: leaving the viewer with the question how many other wonderfully talented performers will never get the chance to showcase their true talents because of faulty assumptions, and how many other women are out there living in quiet degradation like Aileen Wuornos.
Re-Veiw Grade: B
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Cold Mountain (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 25, 2003:
Premise: At the end of the Civil War, Inman (Jude Law, scruffy) deserts the Confederate lines to journey back home to Ada (Nicole Kidman), the love of his life he’s spent a combined 10 minutes with.
Results: Terribly uneven, Cold Mountain‘s drama is shackled by a love story that doesn’t register the faintest of heartbeats. Kidman is wildly miscast, as she was in The Human Stain, and her beauty betrays her character. She also can’t really do a Southern accent to save her life (I’m starting to believe the only accent she can do is faux British). Law’s ever-changing beard is even more interesting than her prissy character. Renee Zellweger, as a no-nonsense Ma Clampett get-your-hands-dirty type, is a breath of fresh air in an overly stuffy film; however, her acting is quite transparent in an, “Aw sucks, give me one ‘dem Oscars, ya’ll” way.
Nate’’s Grade: C
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I kept meaning to come back to Cold Mountain, a prototypical awards bait kind of movie that never really materialized, but one woman ensured that it would be on my re-watch list for 2003. My wife’s good friend, Abby, was eager to hear my initial thoughts on the movie when I wrote my original review at the age of twenty-one. This is because Cold Mountain is a movie that has stayed with her for the very fact that her grandfather took her to see it when she was only nine years old. While watching, it dawned on nine-year-old Abby that this was not a movie for nine-year-olds, and it’s stuck with her ever since. I think many of us can relate to watching a movie with our parents or family members that unexpectedly made us uncomfortable. For me, it was Species, where I was 13 years old and the movie was about a lady alien trying to procreate. I think my father was happy that I had reached an acceptable age to go see more R-rated movies in theaters. Social media has been awash lately with videos of festive families reacting to the shock value of Saltburn with grumbles and comical discomfort (my advice: don’t watch that movie with your parents). So, Abby, this review is for you, but it’s also, in spirit, for all the Abbys out there accidentally exposed to the adult world uncomfortably in the company of one’s parents or extended family.
Cold Mountain succumbs to the adaptation process of trying to squeeze author Charles Frazier’s 1997 book of the same name into a functional movie structure, but the results, even at 150 minutes, are unwieldy and episodic, arguing for the sake of a wider canvas to do better justice to all the themes and people and minor stories that Frazier had in mind. Director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation hops from protagonist to protagonist, from Inman to Ada, like perspectives for chapters, but there are entirely too many chapters to make this movie feel more like a highly diluted miniseries scrambling to fit all its intended story beats and people into an awards-acceptable running time. This is a star-studded movie, the appeal likely being working with an Oscar-winning filmmaker (1996’s The English Patient) of sweep and scope and with such highly regarded source material, a National Book Award winner. The entire description of Cold Mountain, on paper, sounds like a surefire Oscar smash for Harvey Weisntein to crow over. Yet it was nominated for seven Academy Awards but not Best Picture, and it only eventually won a single Oscar, deservedly for Renee Zellweger. I think the rather muted response to this Oscar bait movie, and its blip in a lasting cultural legacy, is chiefly at how almost comically episodic the entire enterprise feels. This isn’t a bad movie by any means, and quite often a stirring one, but it’s also proof that Cold Mountain could have made a really great miniseries.
The leading story follows a disillusioned Confederate defector, Inman (Jude Law), desperately trying to get back home to reunite with his sworn sweetheart, Ada (Nicole Kidman), who is struggling mightily to maintain her family’s farm after the death of her father. That’s our framework, establishing Inman as a Civil War version of Odysseus fighting against the fates to return home. Along the way he surely encounters a lot of famous faces and they include, deep breath here, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi, Cillian Murphy, Eileen Atkins, Taryn Manning, Melora Walters, Lucas Black, and Jena Malone. Then on Ada’s side of things we have Zellweger, Donald Sutherland, a villainous Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson, Charlie Hunam, Kathy Baker, Ethan Suplee, musician Jack White, and Emily Descehanel, and this is the storyline that stays put in the community of Cold Mountain, North Carolina.
That is a mountain of stars, and with only 150 minutes, the uneven results can feel like one of those big shambling movies from the 1950s that have dozens of famous actors step on and as quickly step off the ride. Poor Jena Malone (Rebel Moon) appears as a ferry lady and literally within seconds of offering to prostitute herself she is shot dead and falls into the river (well, thanks for stopping by Jena Malone, please enjoy your parting gift of this handsome check from Miramax). Reducing these actors and the characters they are playing down to their essence means we get, at most, maybe 10-15 minutes with them and storylines that could have been explored in richer detail. Take Portman’s character, a widowed mother with a baby trying to eke out a living, one of many such fates when life had to continue after the men ran to war for misbegotten glory. She looks at Inman with desperate hunger, but it’s not exactly lust, it’s more human connection. When she requests that Inman share her bed, it’s just to feel another warm presence beside her, someone that can hold her while she weeps about the doomed fate of her husband and likely herself. There’s a strong character here but she’s only one stop on our expedited tour. The same with Hoffman’s hedonistic priest, a man introduced by throwing the body of a slave woman he impregnated over a ridge, which might be the darkest incidental moment of the whole movie. His character is played as comic relief, a loquacious man of God who cannot resist the pleasures of the flesh, but even he comes and goes like the rest of our litany of very special guest stars. They feel more like ideas than characters.
This is a shame because there are some fantastic scenes and moments that elevate Cold Mountain. The opening Civil War battle is an interesting and largely forgotten (sorry Civil War buffs) battle that begins with a massive surprise attack that produces a colossal explosion and crater and turns into a hellish nightmare. Granted, the movie wants us to sympathize with the Confederates who were bamboozled by the Yankee explosives buried under their lines, and no thank you. The demise of Hoffman’s character comes when he and Inman are captured and join a chain gang, and they try running up a hill to get free from approaching Union troops. The Confederates shoot at the fleeing men, eventually only with Inman left, who struggles to move forward with the weight of all these dead men attached to him. When they start rolling down the hill, it becomes a deeply macabre and symbolic struggle. The stretch with Portman (May December) is tender until it goes into histrionics, with her literal baby being threatened out in the cold by a trio of desperate and starving Union soldiers (one of which played by Cillian Murphy). It’s a harrowing scene that reminds us about the sad degradation of war that entangles many innocents and always spills over from its desired targets. However, this theme that the war and what it wrought is sheer misery is one Minghella goes to again and again, but without better characterization with more time for nuance, it feels like each character and moment is meant to serve as another supporting detail in an already well-proven thesis of “war is hell.”
Even though I had previously watched the movie back in 2003, I was hoping that after two hours of striving to reunite, that Inman and Ada would finally get together and realize, “Oh, we don’t actually like each other that much,” that their romance was more a quick infatuation before the war, that both had overly romanticized this beginning and projected much more onto it from the years apart, and now that they were back together with the actual person, not their idealized imaginative version, they realized what little they had in common or knew about each other. It would have been a well-played subversion, but it also would have been a welcomed shakeup to the Oscar-bait romantic drama of history. Surely this had to be an inconvenient reality for many, especially considering that the men returning from war, the few that did, were often not the same foolhardy young men who leapt for battle.
Zellweger (Judy) was nominated for Best Actress in the preceding two years, for 2001’s Bridget Jones Diary and 2002’s Chicago, which likely greased the runway for her Supporting Actress win from Cold Mountain. There is little subtlety about her “aw shucks” homespun performance but by the time she shows up, almost fifty minutes into the movie, she is such a brash and sassy relief that I doubt anyone would care. She’s the savior of the Cold Mountain farm, and she’s also the savior of the flagging Ada storyline. Pity Ada who was raised to be a nice dutiful wife and eventual mother but never taught practical life skills and agricultural methods. Still, watching this woman fail at farming will only hold your attention for so long. Zellweger is a hoot and the spitfire of the movie, and she even has a nicely rewarding reconciliation with her besotted old man, played by Brendan Gleeson, doing his own fiddlin’ as an accomplished violin player. As good as Zellweger is in this movie is exactly how equally bad Kidman’s performance is. Her Southern accent is woeful and she cannot help but feel adrift, but maybe that’s just her channeling Ada’s beleaguered plight.
I think there’s an extra layer of entertainment if you view Inman’s journey in league with Odysseus; there’s the dinner that ends up being a trap, the line of suitors trying to steal Ada’s home and hand in the form of the duplicitous Home League boys, Hoffman’s character feels like a lotus eater of the first order, and I suppose one reading could have Portman’s character as the lovesick Calypso. Also, apparently Cold Mountain was turned into an opera in 2015 from the Sante Fe Opera company. You can listen here but I’m not going to pretend I know the difference between good and bad opera. It’s all just forceful shouting to my clumsy ears.
Miramax spent $80 million on Cold Mountain, its most expensive movie until the very next year with 2004’s The Aviator. Miramax was sold in 2010 and had years earlier ceased to be the little studio that roared so mighty during many awards seasons. I think Cold Mountain wasn’t the nail in the coffin for the company but a sign of things to come, the chase for more Oscars and increasingly surging budgets lead the independent film distributor astray from its original mission of being an alternative to the major studio system. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, it had simply become another studio operating from the same playbook. Minghella spent three years bringing Cold Mountain to the big screen, including a full year editing, and only directed one other movie afterwards, 2006’s Breaking and Entering, a middling drama that was his third straight collaboration with Law. Minghella died in 2008 at the still too young age of 54. He never lived to fully appreciate the real legacy of Cold Mountain: making Abby and her grandfather uncomfortable in a theater. If it’s any consolation to you, Abby, I almost engineered my own moment trying to re-watch this movie and having to pause more than once during the sex scene because my two children wanted to keep intruding into the room. At least I had the luxury of a pause button.
Re-View Grade: B-
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Big Fish (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 25, 2003:
Premise: Estranged son Will (Billy Crudup) travels back home in an effort to know his ailing father Edward Bloom (Albert Finney; Ewan McGregor as the younger version). Will hopes to learn the truth behind a man who spent a lifetime spinning extravagant tall tales.
Results: Despite a shaky first half, Big Fish becomes a surprisingly elegant romance matched by director Tim Burtion’’s visual whimsy. McGregor’’s shining big-grinned optimism is charming. Not to be confused with the similar but too mawkish Forrest Gump, Burton’’s father-son meditation will have you quite choked up at its moving climax. Fair warning to those with father issues, you may want to steer clear from Big Fish. You know who you are.
Nate’’s Grade: B+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Tim Burton has never really made a movie like Big Fish before or in the twenty years since. He’s made movies that are aimed at children, like the Disney live-action remakes for Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland, and he’s made animated movies that are more wholesome while still holding to the man’s creepy-cute aesthetic, but he’s never made a movie so unabashedly sentimental as 2003’s Big Fish. Many of his stories involve alienation and outcasts and outsiders and characters accepting themselves, their unique oddities, and their unconventional families. This movie was different. It was based on the 1998 novel by Daniel Wallace and primarily concerns the relationship between fathers and sons as the paterfamilias is nearing his end, a not unfamiliar plot structure for treacle and tears. It’s about a smooth-talking man of legendary tall tales about his life and his exasperated son trying to find real answers. That’s the movie. It’s purposely small even though the tales are tall. There’s nothing larger than simply resolving the strained relationship between father (Albert Finney) and son (Billy Crudup). It’s the most intimate movie of Burton’s career while still finding a place for his fantastical visual whimsy, as the outlet for Edward Bloom’s (Finney as the dying version, Ewan McGregor as the younger version) fantastical tales of adventure. It’s a movie elevated by Burton’s signature style and it’s one that still, in 2023, had me choking up and tears streaming down my face by the conclusion.
This is an episodic movie by design and it does hamper some of the emotional investment, until that whammy of a culmination. Because we know the younger Edward Bloom is exaggerating his life’s travails for entertainment, and perhaps a dash of pride to heighten his deeds, it makes the many sequences of young Edward and his escapades feel a bit fleeting, as if we’re trying to find the larger meaning hidden within the fables and the fabulous. The ultimate point is that the entertaining diversions and exaggerations are who Edward Bloom is, and ultimately trying to discern truth from legend loses sight of the appeal of this charming man and his wild tales. I can understand this while also slightly disagreeing with the conclusion. It’s a little pat to say, well, the point of all these extravagant stories is simply that they were entertaining, never mind about finding a buried meaning or truth. It’s like saying, “Hey, just enjoy the ride.” The point is to fall in love with the storyteller and see the storytelling itself as its own act of love, which I don’t think works until the very end of the movie. Until then, it’s a transitory series of adventures, from wartime to the circus to aggressively persistent courtships and hidden magical towns, each reflective of the indomitable spirit and cheery optimism of our chief yarn-spinner.
In that way, it’s easy for the viewer to adopt the same perspective as Will (Crudup), and that may be the hidden genius of screenwriter John August (Go), or I may be projecting. Our plight is the same as the son: we’re trying to discover what is actually real about the real man. It’s easy to feel his exasperation as he wants something genuine from this man and only keeps getting the same old tales and stories, and everyone else is smiling broadly and happy to just accept the man on his own terms. That’s where Will’s character arc goes, finally accepting his father on his terms, which means playing along with his rules. It’s a level of empathy and acceptance rolled together, but it’s also like two hours of a character going, “My dad might be a liar and I’m curious who he is,” and then in the end going, “My dad might be a liar but I guess that’s who he is.” It doesn’t feel like the grand epiphany that the movie thinks it is, even with Danny Elfman’s Oscar-nominated score trying to stir every doldrum of your heart (Elfman has only been nominated four times in his storied career, also for Good Will Hunting, Milk, Men in Black). So for much of the movie’s running time I’m pleasantly entertained but a little frustrated that the movie doesn’t seem to be digging closer into the man garnering all this unwavering attention.
However, it’s at the very end where Big Fish really transcends its limitations to become something deeply moving and powerful. As I re-watched, I’m twenty years older, and likewise my own father is twenty years older, and moments like this have more potency to me. It’s about the son accepting his father on the same terms he fought so hard to circumvent, and so the ending becomes a beautiful exchange of the storyteller inviting someone else to finish his story’s ending. It’s surprisingly profound when you boil it down to its essentials, and that may be why I had tears dripping down my face as the adult son narrates one last fantastic tale of helping his father escape from the hospital, dart through traffic in his classic car, and arrive for a farewell with all the many friends he’s made through his many decades of laughter and camaraderie. Edward then transforms into the fish, becoming the very symbol of his “fish tales,” and lives on through the stories and memories of others, simply but effectively communicated with the mourners engaged in retelling Edward Bloom’s escapades through engaged pantomime. It’s one of the most clear-cut examples for me of a perfectly good movie really hitting another level in the end.
Big Fish began a long collaboration between Burton and August, who has become such a prolific Hollywood scribe that he’s likely had his hand on just about every script in town. August would later be trusted to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and Dark Shadows; that’s five Burton projects in nine years. For those keeping track, this was only the second Helena Bonham Carter appearance in a Burton movie, the first being the misbegotten 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. It’s also fun to watch Marion Cotillard (Inception) in her first American movie as Will’s pregnant wife.
Big Fish also has a strange unintended legacy regarding someone else who connected with it. It was the last film seen by the famous playwright and monologist Spalding Gray, an enormously compelling storyteller who, much like Edward Bloom, favored the oral tradition. He suffered through depression most of his life, which was amplified after a severe car accident and multiple surgeries to recuperate in the early 2000s. On January 10, 2004, he took his children to see Big Fish and the next day was declared missing. His body was found in the East River in New York City and it’s believed Gray took his own life leaping from the Staten Island Ferry. His wife, Kathleen Russo, told New York Magazine in 2008 that Gray had cried throughout the movie and she concluded, “I think it gave him permission to die.” It’s unfair to blame the movie for a suicidal man’s decision-making, but I think it’s interesting that the emotional closure onscreen was so powerfully felt that Gray may have felt a personal level of closure as well.
My original 2003 review was so minimal, one of five or six short capsule reviews I wrote together as end-of-the-year awards contenders (same with the upcoming Cold Mountain re-watch), so I wanted to add more thoughts to the subject. My opinion feels relatively the same twenty years later though the ending had even more power as a 41-year-old than at twenty-one. I’ll keep my review the same for relatively the same reasons, though I hope Burton returns back to telling another Big Fish kind of detour (2014’s Big Eyes was not that).
Re-View Grade: B+
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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released November 14, 2003:
Without sounding easily amused, this movie really is glorious filmmaking. With Peter Weir’’s steady and skilled direction we get to really know the life of the early 19th century. We also get to know an armada of characters and genuinely feel for them. Russell Crowe is outstanding as Captain Jack Aubrey. His physicality and emotions are expertly showcased. When he gives a motivational speech you’’d understand why people would follow him to the ends of the Earth. Paul Bettany (again buddying up to Crowe after ‘A Beautiful Mind’) is Oscar-worthy for his performance as the ship’s’ doctor and confidant to the Captain. He’’s not afraid to question the Captain’’s motives, like following a dangerous French ship all around South America. ‘Master and Commander ’hums with life, and the battle sequences are heart-stopping and beautifully filmed. It took three studios to produce and release this and every dollar spent can be seen on the screen. ‘Master and Commander’ is fantastic, compelling entertainment with thrills, humanity, and wonder. It’’s grand old school Hollywood filmmaking.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
They really don’t make movies like Master and Commander anymore and that is a detriment to every facet of our society. It took three different studios to bankroll this expensive movie, made all the more expensive by being almost entirely set at sea, a very costly and volatile location. In a just world, this would have been the beginning of a cinematic universe to rival Marvel, and the dashing Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) would be as beloved as Captain Jack Sparrow, and children would beg their parents to read the dozen naval adventure novels by Patrick O’Brian. Just imagine lines of children for Halloween eagerly dressed in little admiral outfits with long blonde ponytails. Unfortunately, we do not live in this utopian universe, and 2003’s Master and Commander was the one and only movie we ever got. It received ten Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Weir, winning two Oscars for Cinematography and Sound Editing, two of the only categories where runaway champion Return of the King wasn’t nominated. This is a masterpiece and a prime example of Hollywood filmmaking at its best. It’s just as easy to be transported in 2023 as it was back in 2003.
This movie is still effortlessly engaging and enthralling, dropping you onto the HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic wars. Even the opening text starts to get your blood pumping: “Oceans have become battlefields.” The opening act is a tremendous introduction to life onboard an early nineteenth-century ship, giving us a sense of the many crewmen and their responsibilities, as well as the different pieces working in tandem while under attack from a French vessel. The movie is structured as an elongated cat-and-mouse chase between the two ships, with the English trying to outsmart the faster French ship with its heavy cannons that easily outnumber the Surprise. Each stage presents a new challenge. One sequence involves them setting up a ruse with a smaller ship attached with a lantern to trick the French vessel into following the decoy at night. The constant threat of this sleeker ship getting the drop on them and attacking is always present, turning the opposition into a mythic monster breaking forth through the fog. The tests of command and camaraderie lead to important questions over duty and sacrifice. There are several children manning the decks as well, cadets eager to be the next generation of English warriors. It’s a shocking reality to process through our modern perspective, and it’s made even harder when tragedy befalls these youngest sailors just like any of the other crew. The movie is steeped in authentic details and realism that makes you feel like you’ve dropped into living history.
In 2023, Gabriella Paiella wrote a GQ article titled “Why Are Guys So Obsessed with Master and Commander?” noting its enduring popularity with a certain selection of Millennial men (yours truly included). She theorized part of its ongoing appeal is how wholesome the movie comes across, with depictions of positive and healthy male friendships. Even the dedication to service is depicted in a way forgoing jingoism. This is a deeply empathetic movie about men who deeply love one another. The most toxic depiction on screen isn’t one born of masculinity run amok during wartime but more a division in class amplified by superstition. Pity poor midshipman Hollum (Lee Inglebee), a man who cannot make friends with the crew because they disdain his privilege and will never see him as a better or an equal. He becomes a scapegoat for the bad luck of the ship, as they feel he is a “Jonah,” a curse. Poor Hollum, who sees no way out of this dilemma and literally plunges overboard with cannonball in hand, ridding the crew of their reputed curse (the wind picks up the sails the next morning). Beyond this valuable and sad storyline, the men of the Surprise seem so grateful for one another’s company. It’s a guy movie that invites men to escape to the frontier as an inclusive summer camp (no girls allowed!).
By the end of this movie, as we’re utilizing every nautical trick we’ve learned and preparing to seize the elusive French boat, my body was shaking in anticipation. We’ve gone on this journey and gotten to know a dozen faces, and we feel part of the team to the point that we’re onboard too. Seeing any of these men close their eyes permanently is awful. It’s not just keen military strategy and theory being discussed; we feel the real human cost. A small moment at the end, where a young man asks for help to sew the death shroud of his mentor, just hits you in the guts. Even watching poor Hollum processing his final fateful decision is heartbreaking. I still gasp even today watching Doctor Maturin (Paul Bettany) accidentally shot and then have to perform his own surgery. You feel the highs and lows throughout this voyage because the movie has made you care. The sheer adventure of it all is terrific, but it’s the immersive details and the strong character writing for everyone that makes this movie so special. It’s not just a rousing high-seas tale of bravery but also a stirring and empathetic character piece and absorbing drama.
It’s astounding to me that Weir isn’t still one of the hottest working directors. The Australian has earned four Best Director nominations across three decades (1985’s Witness, 1989’s Dead Poets Society, 1998’s Truman Show) and proven he can handle any genre with any style. He’s only directed a single movie since Master and Commander, 2010’s Siberian prisoner of war movie, The Way Back. In twenty years, we’ve only been given one other Peter Weir movie, and that is a travesty. In a recent interview, Weir confirmed he’s essentially retired from directing. If only time had been kinder to this great director. For comparison’s sake, other famous artists that also have four Directing nominations include Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, and Francis Ford Coppola.
I assumed Master and Commander would still be good to re-watch in 2023, but I was amazed at how quickly I fell back under the movie’s sway so completely absorbed. It’s the kind of movie where everything just feels so natural, so authentic, and so compelling, where the hard work can be too easily undervalued because it all just feels like a documentary. This movie is so captivating and enthralling and every adjective you can devise. It earns them all. Why oh why did we never get a second of these? There were over a dozen novels as source material at the time of the first movie. According to that same 2023 GQ article, the studio head at Fox, Tom Rothman, explained that he was a lifelong fan of the O’Brian novels, having fallen in love with them as a boy. It took the studio chief using his position to get this kind of movie made in 2003, that’s the level of corporate power necessary to circumvent all the naysayers trying to kill this. I guess rather than mourn the lack of sequels I should count my blessings that we have even one. You were too good for this world, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Re-View Grade: A
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