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The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Dec 11

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Interesting and beautifully filmed and yet the complexities have a vacation-porn feel to them as the story churns further. Excellent acting with all involved as they display the top of their game. Matt Damon is magnetic as the socially murderous Mr. Ripley, and often times a bit frightful. He does what he feels needs to be done once he gets a taste of the good life and wants nothing from leaving it behind. Supporting players such as Jude Law and the oh so talented Phillip Seymour Hoffman contribute solidly and flawlessly. Ripley actually packs more suspense then you would think from the man responsible for one of my most boring theater experiences (I mean of course The English Patient) but wrings true tension and challenges the audience to pull for the bad guy. I must note that the ambiguous ending seems to detract from the impact of the movie. But for many reasons and despite seeing Damon eerily coddle up to a corpse, Ripley is a fine flick with some great characters presented. The more I watch this film the more I enjoy it.

Nate’s Grade: A-

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The Bone Collector (1999)

Nov 8

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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)

Oct 22

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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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Double Jeopardy (1999)

Sep 24

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“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

This movie also revisited and analyzed in the article, “1999: The Greatest Year in Film? A Review Re-View.”

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A Simple Plan (1998)

Sep 12

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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)

Sep 7

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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

This movie also revisited and analyzed in the article, “1999: The Greatest Year in Film? A Review Re-View.”

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Stigmata (1999)

Sep 4

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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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Fight Club (1999)

Sep 3

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Fight Club is a movie that will kick you in your teeth. It’s the adaptation of a sort of anarchist handbook by David Fincher, the man who gave us the grisly masterpiece Se7en. Fincher’s latest re-teaming with Brad Pitt is a disturbingly gritty tale of politics and violence.

Ed Norton plays our un-billed narrator through the harrowing tale of fascist propaganda and anti-social behavior. Norton dwells in a world of cubicles and consumerism. He meets Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden on a flight and the two instantly connect. Norton moves in with Pitt into something resembling the Munster’s house once his own apartment has exploded. Pitt and Norton find the therapeutic realization through fighting. These fights grow larger and build up into clubs where all the guys are fighting to get in to get their head slammed on concrete. These clubs start turning into neo-fascist soldiers of fortune as they try to ambitiously grow and destroy the reality of consumerism. It kind of spins out from there and never returns back.

David Fincher’s direction is ultra slick and highly stylized. He is one of the most lavish and intriguing visual artists of this decade. He really knows how to pump out excitement and vivid hypnotism from striking images and tones strewn apart every inch of letter-boxed form. Norton has the same commanding presence and magnetic performance that he flashed so brilliantly in last year’s American History X. Norton is the one that runs the emotional gambit and shows just how it should be done. Brad Pitt takes on a role none have seen (Does anyone remember Pitt splicing porn images into children’s films with Legends of the Fall?) and once again proves there’s a calculating and superb actor behind the pretty face. Helena Bonham Carter goes leaping against type to play the bumbling Goth love interest with such charm and humor. And Meat Loaf will really surprise as a pathetic breast enhanced friend to Norton.

Fight Club speaks to a world where men feel they have been robbed of what has historically defined them; a world with Oprah, The English Patient, and self-help groups telling them to cry, be kind, rewind. All of the social consciousness has made some men feel less like their upright ancestors. So Fight Club‘s proposition is that to freely express your emotions you need to either be pummeled into ground round or be the one doing the pummeling. The notion is a tad laughable. Fight Club is a flick with so much on its mind to say that it brisks from topic to topic sometimes not dwelling as much as it could. The twist ending is unnecessary and is something that truly comes out from left field.

Fight Club has been criticized for its promotion of violence, but if anyone actually sees the film the violence is gruesomely repellent. No kid is going to walk out of this and think it would be cool to start a Fight Club in their local suburb. The movie is an interesting mirror to our always-on-the brink commercial society, and its push toward a kinder gentler civilization and its effects on the male psyche. Despite some oddities at the end and some fascistic rhetoric, Fight Club is an exciting blend of suspense, action, and dark humor. Go ahead and break the first rule of Fight Club – tell your friends about the adrenaline kick this movie is.

Nate’s Grade: A

This movie also revisited and analyzed in the article, “1999: The Greatest Year in Film? A Review Re-View.”

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Stir of Echoes (1999)

Sep 2

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Another one? Yes and no, you see Stir of Echoes may be the latest supernatural scare-fest released but it proves itself a worthy competitor to The Sixth Sense. Director Koepp, the man among boys when it comes to screenwriting, provides enough eerie chills through the movie without having to go back to the well for any cheap scares much. The direction and unveiling of the story is very well done for the movie’s overall tone.

The meat and bones of this picture is Kevin Bacon. He throws down all the doors and delivers a riveting performance that is most likely his career best. But what about Wild Things you say? Well indeed Kevin showed his bacon in that movie, but in Stir of Echoes he beautifully captures a man breaking down by forces he can’t understand or control. He is magnetic with his character and provides real merit to the film’s compelling case for credibility in The Sixth Sense‘s powerful shadow. Another bright face in the movie is Kathryn Erbe playing Bacon’s suffering and distant significant other. She delivers a rock-solid performance to coexist with Bacon’s descent into madness. She may not get the credit she deserves but she quietly shows her acting prowess in every scene she’s in.

The movie does seem to run out of gas 3/4 of the way through, switching over from mysterious supernatural chiller to run-of-the-mill revenge from beyond the grave scenario. The end is mostly predictable but no less effective. Some of the characters could have been fleshed out better to have more purpose for the finale but I guess you can live with how things are.

In any other given summer Stir of Echoes would be destined to be a critical and commercial success, but then along came The Sixth Sense. True that there are some similar plot points but both movies are worth while complete with some chills themselves. Stir of Echoes does deserve to get more than a look in this new genre that’s being heavily populated by filth. Besides, it’ll allow you a few more people to link to Kevin Bacon whenever a party game arises.

Nate’s Grade: B

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The 13th Warrior (1999)

Aug 17

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The movie is supposedly based upon Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead but to what extent I don’t know having not read it, and after the movie I’d never be interested in reading one sentence. The story goes like this; Antonio is kicked out of his homeland for making googily-eyes at the wrong lady, then picked up by a Norse group of men to stop a band of bear-people from killing a small village. That’s the plot. There it is.

The overblown sword-swinging wannabe epic is nothing more than a series of carnage strung together. The movie is basically one long battle sequence with plenty of heads rolling and blood spilling. I just wish that the battles were lit better so I could see what the hell was going on. There’s so much blood flying that there should be a sign in the theater saying “Warning: The first five rows, you will get wet.” You know you’re in trouble with a Medieval hack-and-slash piece when the most interesting thing during the battles is the pretty scenery. And pretty it is.

Antonio Banderas hones the art of the befuddled stare and surmises it as the only attempt of sensible acting in the movie. Rounding out the rest of the baker’s dozen of warriors are mostly unknown Scandinavian actors that will remain unknown. Banderas tries to keep the audience’s attention but is powerless to stop the inevitable yawns that will come.

The characters are all copies of the same mold and the characterization is thin. The story is so incomprehensible and incoherent that it introduces characters, gives them all promise, then directly forgets they ever existed for the rest of the movie and steers off to the next beheading. The love interest is horribly underused and as such largely made for the purpose of cleaning some nasty cuts and wounds from the big bad boys. The movie is extremely slow paced, sometimes unbearably so. The cliched script as a whole introduces so many other promising directions that do nothing but enrage you with the path the movie does decide to take.

Little more than a testosterone pumped B-movie, The 13th Warrior even fails to excite the average moviegoer with any sense of tension. This movie has been sitting on the shelf of Touchtone for over a year of reshoots, edits, test screenings and such. I wish it had remained on the shelf.

Nate’s Grade: C-

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