Movies Watched The Week of 6/7 - 6/13

Good morning ladies and jerks.  Welcome to the newest installment of my self indulgent piece of weekly work. It’s a solid week all around that jumps through genres.  Nothing reaches greatness but one comes close.  And I jump headlong into an important movie in the annals of cinema.  Take a look at the week and see if you agree or get interested in seeing the flicks.  Enjoy, jerks.  

Clear and Present Danger (June 7th, 2015)

Director: Phillip Noyce

Starring: Harrison Ford, Willem Dafoe, Joaquim De Almeida, and Henry Czerny

We got us here the second and final run Harrison Ford had as the Tom Clancy hero Jack Ryan.  And the second time is the charm for Ford, and third for the character as this is the best Jack Ryan movie there is.  Because while The Hunt For Red October had a bit of complexity in the story, this is the only one that throws Jack into a story where his ideas of right and wrong are thrown asunder and he has to do things he never thought he’d have to.  His faith in the system is shaken and it makes for a much more moral ambiguous story.  The story concerns a South American drug cartel and a hit they commit that accidentally gets the attention of the US President.  When the President decides to start a black ops war against the organization that did this, American lives are on the line and Jack Ryan is sucked into it as a potential patsy.  Now being a Tom Clancy story, it is a bit dry and kinda slow.  It may be a bit too long and too interested in the tedium of the bureaucracy of the CIA to be a beginning to end thrill ride.  But at a certain point, maybe 30 minutes in, the movie picks up the pace and the action starts to ramp up and the stakes start getting murkier and deadlier.  Ford is doing that Ford thing, playing a smart and kinda cranky man with a set of absolute ideals that won’t be corrupted.  Dafoe is a more honorable version of his slimy type performance.  Almedia is a drug dealer again and plays it with more intelligence than his usually roles call for.  This is a much more sedate version of an action movie but it has some real charm and bite to it’s story.  Much more than Shadow Recruit.

Rating: 8.5/10

Desperate Hours (June 8th, 2015)
Director: Michael Cimino
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Anthony Hopkins, Mimi Rogers, and Elias Koteas

Michael Cimino is a really sad case to behold.  He got his big break thanks to Clint Eastwood.  After co writing Magnum Force for Clint, Clint was so impressed that he bought a script from Cimino and allowed him to direct it.  That was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a movie that got Jeff Bridges an Oscar nom.  With his second movie, he blew the world away with the Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter, a movie that won 5 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director.  After that, Cimino used his clout to bank roll a passion project that went over budget and was way too long.  That was Heavens Gate, the notorious bomb that killed United Artists and effectively killed his career.  It took him 5 years to get another movie going, and it was another bomb entitled Year of The Dragon.  After two massive art films, he was thrown into the B movie world, making some real crap to just work.  Then he did The Sicilian two years later, another bomb.  3 years later, he’d make this movie, Desperate Hours.  It’s based on an old play about a criminal holding a family hostage until his girlfriend can get to him.  It’s an ok movie.  It’s nothing really special and would fit right in at 2 am on TNT.  Not only is it sad to see Cimino slumming it with an apparent lack of any real skill anymore, coming off very amateurish compared to Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter.  It’s also sad to see Mickey Rourke in the beginning of the phase of his career that saw him not caring and just fucking around in genre trash.  The fact that he’s not trying and is still watchable is a testament to him.  The rest of the cast is ok, nothing special.  Hopkins did this the same year as the Silence of The Lambs, and it seems he spent all his energy there.  The cast does what they can with the movie, but it’s way too short to make an impression on anyone.  No one is fully fleshed out and are just faces in the crowd that fulfill a role.  It feels chopped up, evident in a real choppy editing job.  And the wrap up of the plot is kinda laughable, with a plan by Hopkins that is unbelievably absurd.  There’s some charm to it mainly thanks to the cast being as watchable as they are with a bad script and some lacking direction.  

Rating: 7/10

Drag Me To Hell (June 10th, 2015)
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, David Paymer, and Dileep Rao

Sam Raimi hadn’t been in the horror game for a good long while, arguably since Army of Darkness or Evil Dead II.  After spending close to a decade making Spiderman movies to varying degrees of success, he needed a break from a monstrous movie by making a movie about monsters.  And it was a good idea, something most blockbuster directors should do to knock the cobwebs off.  It isn’t 100 percent successful, since he tries to make a movie with that mix of comedy and horror that Evil Dead II had.  But that was such a precarious tone to hold that it’s not too crazy to see he didn’t nail it perfectly again, especially almost 30 years later.  The premise is cool enough, with a woman with a good heart having to make a tough decision in her job coming back to bite her in the ass.  Lohman accidentally pisses off a gypsy woman who than curses her to hell.  Watching Lohman try to come to terms with this and fight for her survival is fun enough with some good scares and some good comedic bits.  But Raimi isn’t typically great with human drama, and the stuff away from Lohman isn’t great.  Long tries but can’t elevate the material.  It isn’t as perfect a ride as Evil Dead II, with some slow parts and some egregious CGI in it.  But the biggest problem with the movie is the ending, a twist that doesn’t feel completely earned and feels way too mean spirited to make it a satisfying ending to the story being told.  It just doesn’t fit and kinda sours the movie.  But the prior 99% works to make it watchable enough.  It’s a good reminder than Raimi can still do good, even after a shitshow like Oz: The Great and Powerful. 

Rating: 8/10

Heaven's Gate (June 13th, 2015)
Director: Michael Cimino
Starring: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Issabelle Huppert, and Jeff Bridges

Having now seen the movie, I can totally see why this movie was blasted by critics and abandoned by the film going audience.  It’s a supremely bloated, overlong self indulgent piece of work.  The pacing is horrible and the story he focuses on is not as good as the story he relegates to the background.  But despite the self indulgence on display, there is some really good stuff in the movie.  Stuff that could have flourished with a massive edit.  Chop out a good chunk of this movie and you’ve got a really solid historical drama.  Because the visuals are gorgeous and the majority of the cast is really good.  The only weak link in the cast is Walken because he just does not fit in in a western.  He has a modern presence that is at odds with his surroundings.  But Kristofferson is really good as the stoic lead trying to do the right thing for the people and Huppert is solid as the love interest.  The movie isn’t short though and the movie is hindered by two major elements.  One, an overlong prologue and epilogue that spends way too much time on pointless beats before and after the main story to give Kristofferson some backstory, but it’s all pointless cause we can get this shit through the story.  And secondly, instead of focusing on this really cool morally ambiguous war between the rich businessmen and the poor immigrants, it spends an ungodly amount of time on a somehow ill defined love triangle.  All this time and it still feels ill defined and uninteresting is the surest sign that it needed to be cut.  The time spent there could have been spent on informing the world of the immigrants and getting to know them better before the big fight.  But alas he didn’t and the movie feels imbalanced.  But as is, there is still alot of good when it focuses on the good stuff.  And the movie is surprisingly violent, with some Peckinpah levels of violence exploding out every now and then.  Those moments really help as it drags the movie back from floating too far up its own ass and down into something relatable.  I can’t rightly recommend this outright because it is way too long for most to watch and is not all good.  But for those interested in film history and/or with the time enough to watch the movie that helped end the auteur period in Hollywood, this isn’t as awful as its reputation would suggest.  

Rating: 8/10









Top Movies

1. Clear and Present Danger
2. Drag Me To Hell
3. Heaven's Gate
4. Desperate Hours

- Tom Lorenzo