Blade: Trinity

It helps if you go into BLADE: TRINITY with low expectations. You'll need them. Exepect Wesley Snipes to deliver a one-note performance. Expect ridiculously pathetic vampires who couldn't terrorize a Sunday-school class. Expect choppily edited fight scenes that make it virtually impossible to recognize what's going on half the time. Oh, and expect lots and lots of intrusive product placements - seriously, if there was an award for product placement, BLADE: TRINITY would win, downtown.

If you do all this, you'll probably enjoy BLADE: TRINITY. The movie delivers pretty much exactly what you'd expect: cheesily menacing vampires, lots of people jumping around and kicking other people in the face, and a throbbing soundtrack that's always reminding you to have fun, fun, doggonit! With the exceptions of Parker Posey, gamely trying and failing to portray a menacing vampire leader, and Ryan Reynolds, who seems to think he's in BORDELLO OF BLOOD, the actors and stuntmen are just fine. The production values areprofessional, and the whole thing comes off as a reasonable entertaining exercise.

Just know that you're going to get pretty much exactly what you expect.

Point Blank

POINT BLANK is such a guy movie, they soaked the film stock in testosterone before putting it in the camera. Then they punched the lens a couple of times, just to toughen it up. This is a movie about money, broads, guns, cars, respect, and power: the source material for Mel Gibson’s PAYBACK, but with twice the grit. What a picture.

On the off chance that you’ve never before encountered either PAYBACK or POINT BLANK, here’s the setup: Lee Marvin’s been double-crossed and left for dead by a, erm, business associate who uses the money from a grab-and-go to buy his way in to the local mob. Marvin wants his money back, and there’s your movie. But this isn’t just a Bronsonesque revenge thriller; that’d be pedestrian. It’s a full-on neo-noir picture featuring femmes fatale, double- and triple- crosses, and shadowy figures who’d never waste their time telling you it’s Chinatown – buy a map, you pansy.

John Boorman directed POINT BLANK as only his second feature, but you wouldn't know it. The movie feels like the work of an old pro, and Boorman's crisp, no-nonsense direction keeps things stripped down to their basics, letting the players shine and the story move. And those players do shine. Lee Marvin had always cultivated the persona of a man who eats steel and shits bullets, and he puts that persona to excellent use here. When he tells a man, “I’m going to kill you,” we believe it - and we thank God that he isn’t coming after us, too. Angie Dickinson, who plays a woman straight out of a Dashiell Hammet novel, hits all the right notes: smooth and harsh, seductive and dangerous. She's perfect: pure movie magic in, well, nothing at all. And the villains - don't get me started.

In fact, everything about this movie is great. Even the print on this particular edition is perfect. It looks and sounds crisp, and it has every earmark of a painstaking restoration. Not only is POINT BLACK fun to watch, it’s beautiful, too. Yep, in your face and unblinking, POINT BLANK is one of the best guy movies out there. Enjoy.

Returner

I thought RETURNER was reasonably entertaining. Had I stumbled on the movie while flipping through the channels on a hotel TV, I probably would have enjoyed it (Hey, it worked for BIKER BOYZ.). While trying to keep my eyes open on the Metro after staying up too late watching season one of "Arrested Development," however, I just couldn't get into it.

While the movie has a fun premise, I found the villain to be ridiculously unbelievable and not nearly as cool as he thought he was. The fight scenes cut so clumsily between actors and doubles that they took me out of the moment, the Western cast was ridiculously bad, and the film's climactic moment depends on audience agreement that Transformers are, in fact, cool. Transformers weren't cool when I was a kid, and they aren't cool now.

Still, RETURNER has a breathless quality to it that's undeniable. After a wild night of dinner in a hotel restaurant and setting the alarm clock, it'd be a treat to find this movie on the Sci Fi channel.

Y Tu Mama Tambien

There's a lot to like about Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. It tackles serious concerns in a serious way, it gives us honest and multidimensional characters, and it manages to infuse the tropes of the road trip movie with a pathos and insight not normally found in the genre. Unfortunately, however, it failed to capture my imagination.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is a story about two young men and one fully adult woman. It blends coming of age, sexual maturation, and class concerns seamlessly, but it does so on a level so accessible that it opens itself to accusations of oversimplicity. Yes, we get that the young need to find themselves, intellectually and physically - we've been there. Yes, we get that rich and poor inhabit entirely different worlds - what else have you got? And yes, we understand that the world is soaked in tragedy - so what? This is a movie that, on first viewing, seems far too easy to decode. Perhaps there's more to it, but I saw this one solo and am stuck with my own impressions.

While Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN's insights may seem all too obvious, the film still earns significant credit for fully realizing its characters. Sure, the adolescents are horny kids, but they're horny kids with real hearts, concerns, and questions about themselves and their place in the world. Sure, the woman is the very personification of the madonna-whore, but she's given a level of humanity and an internal (and internalized) journey that's far more profound than that normally found in coming of age films. I didn't really like these people. I didn't really relate to these people. But I believed in these people. And that ain't bad.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is basically a road trip movie, but it's a movie that understands the tedious nature of the road trip, that uses the tropes of the genre to great effect, and that feels for every character on the screen. As its trio of protagonists pass through their various challenges, the film uses those challenges and situations to explore the nature of maturing sexuality and, hell, maturing period. This film "gets it" in a way that so many do not.

So, why did Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN fail to capture my imagination? It clobbered my out of the trap with its lfrequent voice-overs. It's as if the film didn't trust me to intuit pathos and, instead, beat me over the head with it. See this nice spot? People died there long ago. See these nice people? Those nasty capitalists will drive them from their home soon. OK, ok. I get it. Life is hard. Additionally, I had a philosophical problem with some of the movie's assumptions, especially the assumption that freer sex leads to greater happiness. Granted, the film did address the issue forthrightly in its denoument, but even that felt like it was too little, too late.

So, there it is. I respect Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I admire Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. But I don't particularly like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I guess you can't have it all.

Akeelah and the Bee

Concerning AKEELAH AND THE BEE's poor box office showing, Elizabeth wrote that "a large pt. of this audience probably has already seen SPELLBOUND." That's what put me off the movie, but I finally broke down under the pressure of its positive reviews and queued it up. I enjoyed the heck out of it.

AKEELAH AND THE BEE faithfully adheres to the sports movie / inspirational tale formula, but that formula has been around so long because it's so unerringly effective. Akeelah is a spelling prodigy from a rough part of L.A. who follows her dream to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. Will she grow? Will she find worth in her own eyes and the eyes of others? Will she win? Come on - you've been to the movies before. More importantly, does it work? Yes, as a matter of fact. It does.

Keekee Palmer is fine as Akeelah, and Angela Basset and Laurence Fishburne both do fine work here. The movie even offers a few treats to the SPELLBOUND crowd, working some familiar faces from that excellent documentary into the fictionalized version of the Bee, but the star of this movie is the formula. And it always hits its mark.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity has been on my Netflix queue forever. Actually, it's been sitting in the "pending release" portion, as no one had been willing to pony up for a DVD release. Finally, Turner Classic Movies stepped up and released a beautiful print of the film. It was worth the wait.

Not only does Double Indemnity look great, it sounds great. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler put together a cracking good script with quotable lines, and Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck deliver them with gusto. This is a fun movie in a couple of ways.

Here's the setup: Fred MacMurray is morally flexible insurance man Walter Neff. While making a routine sales call, he meets Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson. It's a classic Stanwyck performance: she's sexy, she's hard-edged, and, oh, she's bad news as only Chandler can imagine bad news. Before long, Walter's masterminding a complex insurance scam / murder plot, but it won't be long before everything goes awry. I'm not giving anything away, incidentally - the movie begins with a shot and bleeding Walter confessing to a dictaphone.

Since, like Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity begins by giving away the fate of its protagonist, the question isn't whether the movie will surprise and astonish us. The question is whether it'll make us enjoy the journey. Will it? Well, it depends. Do you like noir? Do you like, MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson? More simply, do you like movies? If you can answer "yes" to any of the above, I bet you'll like Double Indemnity.

EDIT: A friend who works for TCM assures me that this DVD was a Universal, not TCM project from the get-go. I was thrown off by the film's introduction, which features Robert Osbourn on the TCM set. I must still have been thinking about that anklet.

Layer Cake

I liked LAYER CAKE from the very beginning, but the ending made me love it.

LAYER CAKE, written by J.J. Connolly, directed by Matthew Vaughn, and starring Daniel Craig, works from an ancient formula. You know the one: the drug dealer / jewel thief / pickinick basket swiper wants to get out of the game, but first must make One Last Score. So, how does LAYER CAKE rise above its formula? It doesn't, really. Rather, the movie executes it so well that one can't help but be caught up in the twists, turns, doublecrosses, and mounting desperation Daniel Craig's dealer feels as he tries to outsmart the dangerous idiots who surround him.

I've never seen Daniel Craig before, but let me tell you: this guy's got it. I believed that this guy could could be simultaneously brilliant and stupid. I believed that he was a thinker, a leader, the kind of guy who could survive the drug trade well into his thirties. Craig doesn't have to carry the entire movie, however. The supporting cast (featuring Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, & Sienna Miller) is spot-on, the music's note-perfect, the editing is great (look for some creative and fun transitions), and the dialogue's fun to listen to.

And the ending, oh that ending. Pow! What a winner.