Dogma (1999)
In a time where simply having faith in anything, let alone religion, is scoffed at, Kevin Smith daringly and passionately expresses his personal search for answers and understanding. But while the zealots decree Dogma as blasphemy, what they truly miss is the biggest commercial for faith and God that American audiences have seen in decades of cinema.
The story of the religious epic causing all the hubbub begins with a pair of fallen angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) spurned from the pearly gates of Heaven and banished to Wisconsin. One discovers a re-dedication of a church imploring a little used Catholic practice of plenary indulgence allowing whoever to enter through the church’s arches to have their slate cleaned of all sin. The two seize this opportunity of a dogmatic loophole to sneak back into heaven. The only slight problem is that by doing so they reverse a decree of God and disprove the Almighty’s unfallability, and thus will wipe out all of existence. The voice of God (Alan Rickman) recruits a lapsed Catholic named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) for a Holy Crusade to halt the scheming angel’s plans for the good of the universe. Along the way she is aided by two unlikely prophets (the dynamic duo of Jay and Silent Bob), an racially discredited 13th Apostle (Chris Rock), and a shapely strip-teasing muse (Salma Hayek) as they engage with demons, seraphims, angles, and all sorts of celestial “who’s who” to stop the end of existence.
Smith’s direction has taken strides since the point-and-click days of his earlier works; however, there’s still an awkward flatness to his framing and action. Fiorentino plays the role of a grounded character well. Rickman as the bitter Brit shows why he can still take anyone toe-to-toe for acting chops. Affleck and Damon have terrific chemistry together and play off one another for great comedy. Jason Mewes has never been funnier as the terminally stoned and foul mouthed Jay. Rock shows he can restrain his abrasive personality. Salma shows… well she shows she can dance. Jason Lee as an air conditioning-adoring demon and George Carlin as a used car salesman type Catholic Cardinal are so commanding in their presence and excellent in their performances that it’s a sin most of their scenes were cut during editing. Even Alanis Morrisette works as a humanly childish God. She’s given no lines but expresses great feeling and humor anyway.
Dogma is rambunctiously hilarious and a never ending joyride of fun as it jumps from jokes about demons made of excrement to “Buddy Christs” to insightful and sensitive thoughts on religion. Rarely does it bore even with the large plot it must always keep in successive movement. The only drawback Dogma suffers from is the amount of religious points it desires to make. The characters will reach a subject, chat, then directly move on to the next. The sporadic nature can easily keep an audience’s head spinning, but is brought back down to gentle rest from Smith’s Divine wit and sharp writing. Some of the opus’ many characters appear for only brief stretches as Hollywood’s A-list battle for valid screen time among each other.
Smith is not one to shy away from controversy, or his quota of sexual innuendos and profanity. But the protestors for this film attacking its vulgarity are beyond missing the point; Dogma is reaching people the church hasn’t and can’t. It may be an audacious tweaker of a flick, but ultimately it’s bringing up religion into open debate and discussion amongst the masses where there was none before. And isn’t that in itself glorifying some type of achievement?
It would do well the opponents of Dogma to venture into a darkened theater sometime to see the movie and realize it is a humorous affirmation of faith and beliefs. The story of a crisis of faith is relatable to a society too jaded and cynical. Smith’s wrestle with theology is the public’s gain, and his halo only glows a little brighter for having the courage to do so.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Bone Collector (1999)
Another serial killer movie? Didn’t we as an audience learn our lesson already with Kiss the Girls? Apparently not with this latest adaption of standards and predictability that does nothing more then reinvent the old blaming the butler routine. And may I affimingly add that whoever the critic who gasped that this is on par with the masterpieces of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en either is lying through their teeth or has their children’s college education payed exclusively by Universal.
The Bone Collector has fancy gloom, grit, and gore, but it has no substance whatsoever. The script has the feel of being pasted together from leftovers of earlier better movies. It takes one illogical shift after another until the supposedly “surprise payoff” ending comes charging in but echoes more of a unified feel of rip-off instead. Contrivances are in abundance with every scene, and further prove the superiority of Lambs and Se7en in how well they achieved perfectly tuned thrills. The Bone Collector‘s biggest disappointment is in its utter lack of substantial entertainment when the core of the movie is Angelina Jolie getting dirty in dark places wielding a flash light. This kind of stuff may have worked at summer camp around the fire to scare people, but on the big screen the only ones to cower in terror will be the extensively naive.
Not to lambast this clunker too much, because there is some credible acting from the star leads. Denzel Washington at least makes his role non-laughable which is saying a lot in respect, and Jolie looks like she is a fresh talent but this ain’t her vehicle to hitch on to. Her “gifted” police specialist at finding evidence doesn’t seem to special to me with the easily found clues that anyone could trip over.
The suspense in The Bone Collector boils down to flashes of gore and jumps to frighten instead of the meticulous psychological and intense battles in Lambs and Se7en. The serial killer genre is at a glut again, and The Bone Collector is merely the fat of that over-extension that would serve best to be cut loose.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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House on Haunted Hill (1999)
There are some classic horror pics in haunted houses, and the Vincent Price cheese-fest original of House on Haunted Hill is one. The original was campy fun and worth rewatches, but how does the remake fare with a 40 year age gap between the two?
What House on Haunted Hill miraculously achieves what Jan DeBont’s Haunting had tumble through its sticky CGI fingers: the establishment of a true unsettling mood. All throughout Hill you can actually feel the seething, eerie mood inspired from the wonderfully creepy ambiance of the constructed sets. It has a darker component and launches into many sequences of frightening imagery that seem like left-overs from Jacob’s Ladder but are no less effective. So maybe the plot is basically a premise that once established pretty much thins out to non-existence. You will be thinking to yourself that half of the flick is people wandering aimlessly in the bowels of an asylum when they should have enough common sense to not be.
There is no relevant acting since the cast is regarded to fill out the standard stereotypes and yell cheesy zingers at one another with F-bombs spliced into every line. This ain’t yo’ daddy’s House on Haunted Hill! Geoffery Rush, who talked funny in Shine and won an Oscar and who talked funny in Shakespeare in Love and got an Oscar nomination, gleefully plays the host of the supernatural shindig. And he talks funny. Taye Diggs surmises the “funny non-white” character, Chris Kattan surmises the “goofy nutball” character, Famke Janssen plays the “bitchy wife… who can crush people with her thighs” character, and the rest of the cast are interchangeable blondes who actually do get a bit interchanged physically.
Hill is a good shift in your seat spooker up until the end which just really drops the ball beyond belief into a cheap cop-out. Everything up until the part where the “ultimate evil” cloud of charcoal or something is visually haunting and solid entertainment even if it has to run to gore well once too often. But this whole slow moving cloud descends the movie into mediocrity and it just gets more hokey as it goes. The effects for the “ultimate evil” are preposterously bad and wouldn’t frighten a 4-year old with a bladder problem.
Up until the final ten minutes or so, House on Haunted Hill is a guilty pleasure directed sharply to instill the correct senses one should bring out of the story and setting. Hill has moments of inspiration and memorable scenes of horrific faceless demons and hallucinatory flashes of the macabre and bizarre. But the absurdly thrown together ending drowns what could have been a real Halloween treat.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Being John Malkovich (1999)
I think I’ll simply surmise the emphasis of this review in one opening sentence: The most refreshingly and exhilarating original movie in years. MTV music video chief royale Spike Jonze directs a modern day fable that is a hallucinatory trip through the looking glass and into man’s thirst for celebrity. While Malkovich is stuffed with enough brilliant gags to kill the Austin Powers franchise, it is also a deeply articulate and insightful piece about the longing for love and fame. The movie is often thought-provoking while side-splitingly hilarious.
I will not spill one lick of Charlie Kaufman’s plot to ensure the viewing audience the pleasure of astute surprise, and there is plenty. Malkovich is the first film in a long time to have just as many unexpected twists and turns in the final 30 minutes as it does in the first 30 minutes. The acting is wonderful consisting of John Cusack’s greasy puppeteer loser, to Cameron Diaz’s frumpy animal loving wife, to Catherine Keener’s man-eating ice queen, to even a wonderful inspired parody of John Malkovich as himself playing himself.
Being John Malkovich isn’t afraid to tackle weighty subjects such as gender identity or the hunger to be somebody, but it never looks down upon the characters or the audience but instead treats each with nurturing respect. The movie is a breeze of fresh air in a field cluttered with too many formulaic fluff appealing to mass audiences and consumer goods. Malkovich is destined to become a cult classic and deservedly so. The flick is a spurt of creative madness bordering on genius that one wonders how it ever made it into release with today’s society and studio heads. God bless you Spike Jonze and you too Charlie Kaufman. Fare thee well.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Double Jeopardy (1999)
“I can shoot you in the middle of Mardi Gras and they can’t touch me.” Well actually Ms. Judd, they can. You see the rule of double jeopardy is not to be tried for the same crime and same occurrence. Both have to happen for the rule of double jeopardy to succeed. If a thief stole a jewel and was sent to prison then once released stole the same jewel; can he be tried again for the same crime? Of course he can! And so can you my dear Ashley.
Moving on now that that logistic bump in the road has been covered. Double Jeopardy has all the pieces of a thriller but somehow they never cohesively form to make any semblance of a truly exciting and tense caper. The elements are there but it’s just not working. The setups occur but the payoffs seem to be very unrewarding. The biggest problem is all of the film’s plot lines and twists were displayed prominently in the trailer and commercials, so the entire audience is five steps ahead of the characters. Tommy Lee Jones surmises the same role he’s had for the entire decade of the hard-boiled detective on the hunt for a man. Double Jeopardy is essentially no more than The Fugitive 3. And what kind of prison does Ashley go to where they let inmates cut their own hair with sharp scissors unsupervised?
The booming starlet Ashley Judd plays our wrongly convicted and vengeful heroine most effectively. But what man in their right mind would trade Ashley for Annabeth Gish? Ashley has this enticingly warm aura around her and a smile that will merely melt your heart. This woman was made for pictures; her face is etched in beauty and has twinkles reminiscent of the elegant early days of cinema. This is a beautiful woman that deserves to be on the big screen… and she can act too.
Double Jeopardy is at its heart a standard and rather ordinary thriller. It does nothing to rise above mediocrity but is at a level of contentment with where it’s at. You may not bite your nails much with tension but you’ll become better acquainted with your watch.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Jakob the Liar (1999)
In the fickle entertainment industry, little can be as detrimental to a film’s success as bad timing. And the latest Robin Williams’ weepy not only suffers from poor timing, it cuts its own throat with the careless mistake. Coming hot on the heels of another World War II comedy/drama known affectionately as Life is Beautiful would have proved much better if the foreign film had stayed in the art house screens and quickly come and gone. Instead Roberto Benigni’s touching film made its way to big screens, broke the record for best receipts of a foreign film in America, and went on to steal the nation’s hearts and pick up three Oscar statuettes. The Hollywood version of Benigni’s Holocaust fable proves what happens when people take something that was a miracle it worked once before, and so well, and try catching lightening in a bottle again.
Jakob the Liar is never truly any form of comedy, unless you thought Hogans Heroes was in dire need of a big screen adaption because all the other Holocaust movies did not accurately portray the wackiness that was Nazi Germany. Most of the jokes are so grim and morbid that you’ll be gritting your teeth more than smiling.
The story can be very hamfisted and forceful at times, interesting considering there’s not much driving any story. And the end is scene-for-scene exact with Benigni’s flick. Most of the performances are marginal, with many appearing to be weary that they’re even in the movie. The story’s addition of a little girl that Williams’ takes under his wing for guidance is more of a distracting subplot taking attention away from the common thread of one man giving hope to the hopeless. Minus one charming scene with Williams’ improvising a radio broadcast with kitchen utensils she’s mainly a pointless addition.
The splinter in the paw of this movie is Robin Williams himself. Anyone out there remember when he used to do comedy, not schmaltzy bittersweet tug-from-the-heart-strings melodrama? Though his mugging is restrained for the most part, the sentimentality burns thin rather quickly. The movie tries to manipulate you and letting the floodgates loose with those tear ducts, but it’s so clear it’s not going to make you feel but manipulate that you can very easily see the strings as they’re being pulled.
Jakob the Liar does have a good director at its helm to show the Holocaust as the grim reality it was and not sugarcoat anything. A great deal of gratitude should go to the director for at least partially saving Jakob from being worse than it could be. Though I’m of the mind that I’m positive audiences will love it and most likely bash me, I just want everyone to know that Roberto Benigni did it earlier and better and I’d stress seeing that movie instead.
Nate’s Grade: C
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American Beauty (1999)
American Beauty balances between dark comedy and moving drama not only well but tremendously on target. It’s a slice of life showing the dark side of a faceless and cold suburban life. The deterioration of a family and the escape of one man as he realizes the trivial nature of the things that get in the way of seizing life. American Beauty is not a rose for everyone but it’s one standing out from the pack screaming to be picked.
Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, the husband and father of our story’s family. Life has been sucked dry from his system and he’s lost interest in everything he holds around him.
Annette Benning plays Carolyn Burnham, mother and wife. She breaths the mantra, “To be successful one must present an image of success at all times.” like she was beating a Bible until it bled. She’s a woman whom image is everything, and looking good is all that matters. She has become so detached from her family and life that she has actually lost her humanity in the hunt for success while waving her cheerful smile as a mask that eludes to the superficial inside. Carolyn is a woman who refuses to let herself fail or have weakness, and those around her to make her seem weak.
Thora Birch, of Alaska and Now and Then fame, is the estranged daughter to Spacey and Bening. She feels alienated from her parents, and despises them from easily seeing through each. Thora discovers new ways to feel contempt for her parents with each day. She is a repressed child who is looking for an outlet of understanding and help. Enter pot dealing creepy new neighbor Wes Bentley. He sees true beauty where no one could, and is the escape and shoulder that young Thora has needed all her life from her monstrously neglectful parents. Wes videotapes everything in an effort to keep the memories of beauty alive to venture back and relive the moments. He shares his prized image with Thora one day, that of a plastic bag inflating and deflating with the autumn breeze as it swirls around almost balletic dancing. The image is mesmerizingly hypnotic and you understand that Wes is a character who looks beneath the surface and most likely the most noble in the entire movie.
Mena Suvari switches from sweet choirgirl from American Pie to ditzy teen vamp. She is a person who feels such insecurity for herself that the only happiness she can arrive is from being wanted by other people. She must have acceptance in some form or another, and “ordinary” to her is a worse word than “ugly.” She acts like a teen nympho but in the end reveals that she is really an innocent young girl desperately wanting to be liked and wanted.
There are other characters that round out the cast; a brief appearance with Scott Bakula who makes a quantum leap into a gay neighbor, Allison Janney as the mother to Wes and the silent hollow image of a wife she has become to socially hide her husband’s secret, Chris Cooper again as an abusive father who’s maliciously homophobic but hiding a devastating secret deep within, even Peter Gallagher with the biggest eyebrows you’ve ever seen as a suave real estate mogul that knows how to cater to Carolyn’s thematic problems.
The basis of the story hinges on Lester’s reawakening. He is a man going through the motions of life like a walking dead man. A man who tells people that even he wouldn’t remember himself. Lester is an unhappy cog until viewing his daughter’s friend Angela (Suvari) at a high school basketball game. At first glimpse she becomes the intense object of his desire and obsession, and his focus on life centers around this young gal. But with that moment Lester’s life is broken, and his eyes are opened for the first time in a very long time. He sees the trite redundancy with the day-to-day grind of ordinary suburbanite life. Lester breaks free and does what he wishes, he is a free man. Free of his job, his nagging ice queen of a wife, free of all worries and fears.
As far as Oscar races go, all others don’t even bother filling out an application for an invitation – Spacey has Best Actor locked. He might as well start clearing a space on his shelf next to the one he got for The Usual Suspects. Spacey is so wonderfully wry and self degrading that he transforms into an actually likeable almost laid back hero for the audience. They know his tragic fate and feel good when he gets the most he can with each day, and not letting himself be pushed around anymore. Benning is also delightful and wickedly hilarious in her materially overzealous soccer mom. Birch is excellent showing the pains of alienation and showing that despite what her character thinks she is really the last person on earth who needs a boob job. Director Sam Mendes’ first feature after touring the theater circuit shows his devotion to characters and actors with subdued symbolism layered between every frame of film. I say Oscars should go all around and this movie deserves a good swapping of gold statuettes.
I could go on talking about the depth and characters for hours but I’ll just stop here and say that you won’t see a more engaging, compelling, and brutally honest and sadly funny film in the entire year of 1999. One of the best films not only of this year but of the entire decade.
Nate’s Grade: A
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A Simple Plan (1998)
Not as simple as one would be led to believe. A Simple Plan offers great ensemble performances, never-ending suspense, and great execution at telling its tragic fable–all the while making a statement as one of the best films of 1998.
The core and real punch of the picture comes from its two main characters linked by blood but not by much else. The trouble all begins when the bothers and a buddy come across a downed air plane in the forest. with $4 million inside. The idea arises that they should all keep the money and hide their secret from all others. Hank resists at first but the promise of the money draws him in to becoming apart of the plan.
You could say the film’s like a Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Fargo but this gives disservice to director Sam Raimi. The man famous for splatterfest horror outings shows great maturity in pulling something off like this so well.
The acting is some of the finest of the year, well I guess it would be last year. Paxton gives his best performance of his career, and Billy Bob Thornton does for backwater townsfolk what DeNiro did for psychos. My favorite would have to be the Lady MacBeth wife of Hank, played chillingly by Bridget Fonda. Her moral high ground disappears at the sight of the money and she drastically turns into a brooding and malicious character. In bed she whispers plans for her husband to hide his tracks or set up his partners to take the fall. That’s where A Simple Plan turns into a devious game of each other suspicious of the next, and falling victim to their own greed. The money brings out all the true feelings each has for the other that had remained buried inside.
Add a haunting score by master maestro Danny Elfman and you have yourself one fine feature.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Bats (1999)
It’s almost reassuring to see a film like Bats arrive at your multiplex. It means that in an industry fueled by big names and big effects that a cheesy B-movie can still make it through production like the legions that spooked so many naive baby boomers. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves now. It is, after all, a B-movie.
Bats tries to be the winged mammal version of The Brids except not nearly as good. The “story” is of a mad scientist who genetically creates a race of super bats. Why? Well maybe the real question you should ask yourself is why not? Unfortunately the bats get released into a small sleepy town in Texas. The officials catch on, the populace refuses to believe, then… oh what does it matter?! You’ll be able to predict the rest faster than you can tie your shoelaces. Create a plot in your head to fill the void of this one. In my version of Bats space aliens came down and there was an intergalactic civil war between bat-people and humanity’s only source of hope in a band of four teenage girls each with amazing powers. This is what happens when you have to fend for yourself for entertainment.
What should be the most interesting part of Bats turns out to be the absolute lamest: the bats themselves. Were they created in some lab or did they just hibernate out of Fraggle Rock with a thirst for blood? They resemble small dogs with wings in all the amounts of quick-cut closeup shots to hide the fact that they didn’t have the budget to film more than six bats at one time. I don’t know if they’re supposed to come off as frightening or not, but mass hysteria from muppets just doesn’t seem too overwhelming to me.
If Bats were played for camp value it might be a moderately redeemable sense of dumb fun like Deep Blue Sea was earlier this year. Instead the bat wranglers try playing it for scares and skewed laughs, but the scales sure don’t come out even upon viewing. The flick really is laugh-out-loud bad like when one of the characters actually sells out humanity to help the bats, or the distraught and reckless teenagers getting their comeuppance for staying out after curfew like in so many other bad B-monster movies. This movie won’t be appearing on anyone’s resume list in the near future. I think even the Key Grips were ashamed to have had any hand in this. You can’t help but feel Bats missed its window of opportunity for success around the time film went to color. The only screaming you’ll be hearing anywhere in the vicinity of Bats is from people just realizing they spent seven dollars on this thing.
Nate’s Grade: D
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Stigmata (1999)
From the director of Blank Check comes the latest religious up-in-arms controversial picture billed to your local theater. While being wrongly labeled a horror flick, this movie is nothing to get excited over if you take your religion seriously. Because this movie sure doesn’t, and the only ones that will be influenced by this hour and forty minute music video of blood would simply be the gullible.
Patricia Arquette plays Pittsburgh’s young and nubile atheist hero and the finest hairdresser in town, when she isn’t bleeding over her customers that is. Well the party girl gets in touch with some rosaries and has violent seizures and fits, as well as experiencing strange wounds and lashes akin to the wounds of Christ. Faster than you can say “Mulder and Scully where are you?” the Vatican dispatches priest Gabriel Byrne to investigate the bizarre goings on. What he soon discovers turns him into a believer and turns the Catholic church scared that Christ is coming back and brandishing some mean hickory. Paddlin’ line starts west of Rome.
It’s not that the idea is totally repellent or half-baked, but the movie is turned into an MTV video with legs. With all the hyper-editing and pounding electro music from Pumpkinite Billy Corgan you’ll be thrashing in your seat having a violent seizure yourself. The over stuffing of cuts and more blood than a Red Cross drive can’t cover up a head scratcher of a storyline.
The script has so many glaringly logistical problems stacked up everywhere trying to present themselves as pious dogma. Stigmata is merely the recreation of Christ’s wounds, not soul possession. How in the world Arquette becomes the working girl version of Linda Blair is beyond logic. The movie also perceives that stigmata can be transmitted by touch. It’s not an STD people, we don’t need pamphlets trumpeting safe religious reenactments in schools do we? But the biggest hole is not the notion there’s a Catholic conspiracy hiding valuable works of Jesus that may be a threat to their job security. After all the fuss and the build up the hidden passages and books are nothing more than a basic Sunday School lesson. Is this what everyone’s shaking in their gowns over? I’ve seen more religious danger in a Denny’s breakfast menu.
Stigmata is a glitzy and loud poison pen letter to religion. It’s got an incomprehensible storyline and wastes the great actor Jonathon Pryce for the role of a villainous Catholic Cardinal always within reach of his cell phone. Stigmata is an example of what the movie industry is serving out these days: all style, no substance if any, and without any semblance of common sense. So of course it’s destined to make a killing at the box-office.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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