The Naked Spur

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the notion that there was a twist ending to THE NAKED SPUR. There is, but not the in the way I thought. It’s a twist so much more engaging than anything I’d have imagined that it elevates the picture from merely good to damn good. Unfortunately, it also makes the film nearly impossible to write about.

I will write that the cinematography is not particularly fascinating and the music is grating, relentlessly telling us what to think and how to feel. Mid-career Jimmy Stewart is fine, as always, and the supporting cast does its job well enough that no one struck me as a “favor cast.”

But the real credit here goes writers Sam Rolfe and Harold Bloom, who fashion a story that appears straightforward, but gets more and more complex as things develop. By the end, even though I knew this was a Western of a certain era, I had no idea how things were going to turn out. And that twist, wow. This movie took me by surprise.

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY & BULLWINKLE represents either a career low for Robert DeNiro and Rene Russo or a fun, silly jaunt for kids that should be taken as it was intended. I’m inclined to go with the former, but my kids would select the latter.

Here’s the deal: an ambitious young studio executive wants to helm her first movie, but every script she sees is too intelligent. Then, someone pitches her a live-action film based on the old “Rocky & Bullwinkle” cartoons, and she’s ready to sign. But there’s a catch: the pitchers are cartoon villains, and the hook is that they’re ready to come into the real world and wreak havoc. And so it is that DeNiro, as Fearless Leader, Rene Russo as Natasha, and Jason Alexander as Boris find corporeal form. And it isn’t long after that Rocky & Bullwinkle, rendered in a level of CGI somewhere below that of the SCOOBY-DOO films, enter the picture to save the day.

But why am I wasting time setting up the plot? It only exists as a vehicle for sight gags, self-consciously bad puns, and general purpose silliness that had me checking my watch and both my boys delighted. This movie wasn’t made with me in mind, but I respect its dedication to kid-friendly humor and its willingness to throw jokes at the wall and see what sticks.

Do I want to see the once-great Robert DeNiro waste his time with stuff like this? Not really, but I still respect the guy’s willingness to go with the cheesy joke even while I grimace at perversions of some of his signature moments. But hey, he didn’t make this movie with me in mind. And he did entertain the hell out of my kids, which made it possible for me to get some chores done around the house. Rather than criticize the man for his involvement in ROCKY & BULLWINKLE, perhaps I should be thanking him.

The Forbidden Kingdom

So, here's the setup: a young man believes that there must be more to life than he's seeing. In fact, he lives in something of a fantasy world. While trying to impress a girl, he's shown up and knocked around by the local bully. Through a mechanism of the plot, he's transported to a magical realm where he has many adventures, fins love, and becomes a man. He returns to his own world, knocks around the bully, and claims his manhood.

Man, wasn't STARDUST a great picture?

But we aren't here to talk about STARDUST. We're here to talk about THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. In THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM, the mundane bully is so vicious and such a bad actor that he sucks all the fun out of the movie before it can even properly get underweigh (That's how it should be spelled, dammit. The phrase comes from "weighing anchor," not "waying anchor."). Granted, there's a dream sequence of Jet Li doing a fun Monkey King, but I'm tellin' ya, that framing story erased the goodwill the bit earned. Even if it was set in hardscrabble South Boston.

OK, so the framing story sucks. But what about the adventures in the magical realm? I started that part with my arms crossed, wondering why a Jackie Chan / Jet Li teamup even needed a white guy. But then Jackie showed and busted out the "drunken boxing" moves he hadn't used since his last movie with fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, DRUNKEN MASTER II (a film which, by the way, I discovered through the Balcony back in the '90s). So forget about the framing story. Forget about the white guy, even though he was the protagonist. Here was Jackie getting his DRUNKEN MASTER on! That's worth the price of admission, right there! Then Li showed up again, and we got what we came for: a Chan / Li battle, choreographed by Yuen.

Y'know what? I don't care if these guys are getting older and require more quick-cuts to mask their diminished athletic ability. They're still two of the very best, cinematographer Peter Pau (CTHD) is among the very best, and Yuen is the very best. That's worth your rental fee, right there.

Unfortunately, however, THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM isn't an hour and a half of Chan and Li being awesome. It keeps having to make room for this extraneous white guy. Michael Angarano, whom I loved in SKY HIGH, is fine, but I just couldn't see a reason for his character other than marketing. Nor could I see a reason for Yifei Liu, the love interest, other than to have someone to stand around and look pretty. And someone tell Krrish that BingBing Li, as the Bride with White Hair, stole his fan.

This movie could have been great. It could have been awesome. It could have been, well, STARDUST with kung fu. But it's worth renting only if you're a fan of the genre, and even then it's worth renting only for the genre elements. Let's hope that the next time Chan and Li team up, it's for a better project.

Bee Movie

BEE MOVIE is an abject failure.

Well, at least as far as I'm concerned. My 8-yr-old watched it twice. Just when I start to think I'm giving that kid a proper education.

Here's a movie with offputting animation, a dull story, and precisely zero funny lines. OK, there's one, but it was a lawyer joke that I couldn't even laugh at for fear my wife would slap an injunction on my butt. It's about a bee who gets a tryout with his hive's elite pollen gatherers, then goes on to become something of an insectoid César Chávez. Oh, and he also falls in love with a human woman, played by Renée Zellweger. Now, if there's one actress on Earth who can sell a woman falling in love with a bee, it's Zellweger. But I still couldn't buy it.

BEE MOVIE does have one thing going for it, and that's Ray Liotta. But not even he can smear enough honey on this picture to make it sweet. Pass this one by.

Talk to Me

Don Cheadle is one of the great actors of our time.

In DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, he did the impossible: he stole a movie from Denzel Washington. His character, Mouse Alexander, was so smart, so evil, so good, that I couldn't see the man's face for years without wondering whether he had murder on his mind. That film, made in 1995, brought Cheadle to my attention. But this has been his decade. From the cockney safecracker Bashar Tarr in the OCEAN'S movies to the one of the few things about CRASH to the understated, brave, and noble Paul Rusesabagina in HOTEL RWANDA, here's a guy who showed he can do almost anything. But nothing prepared me for Petey Greene.

If I hadn't known that was Don Cheadle under that costume, I never would have guessed it. Cheadle disappears into the role, thinking and talking faster than anyone else in the film or the audience, a man using his raw intelligence and amazing audacity to overcome nearly every obstacle put in his way. Cheadle as Greene is a force of nature, his performance nothing short of brilliant.

I came to this film through an interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor that I read on CHUD. Ejiofor was promoting RED BELT at the time, but he mentioned this as one film of which he was particularly proud. I can see why. Ejiofor plays the audience surrogate, real-life WOR program director Dewey Hughes, the man who gave the real-life Petey his job. I've already said that Ejiofor is an absolutely outstanding performer himself, and here he has the judgement and confidence to get out of Cheadle's way. Director Kasi Lemmons (who made the wonderful EVE'S BAYOU) knows what she's doing here, and she builds a film around this performance that puts us in its time and in its people's hearts in a way that few pictures manage to do.

I don't care if you don't like soul music. I don't care if you don't care about the black experience in the '60s. I don't even care if you aren't a fan of Cheadle, Ejiofor, or Lemmons. You're here because you like movies. And if you like movies, you have got to see Cheadle on fire in TALK TO ME. Queue this one up today.

Seven Men from Now

My understanding of narrative goes something like this: a protagonist changes and grows over the course of a story. By riding along with this protagonist, we change and grow, as well.

The protagonist doesn't change and grow over the course of SEVEN MEN FROM NOW. In fact, one could argue that nobody changes and grows over the course of Bud Boetticher's SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, although a total of twelve men do stop growing altogether. But it's still one hell of a story.

Seven men walked in to the Wells Fargo office in Silver Spring. They walked out with one box of gold in their hands and one dead woman on the floor. Randolph Scott was married to that woman, and Randolph Scott saddled up and went hunting. The movie begins with the hunter finding his first prey, and it's full-bore revenge fantasy from there on out. It's got a stoic and unstoppable hero, villains both noble and ignoble, Indians, cavalry, settlers in a stagecoach, and some of the finest practical stuntwork you're likely to see in a film of its or any other generation.

This is a tight, lean narrative that knows exactly what it's about and exactly how it's going to get there. Scott and Lee Marvin (as the noble villain) are near-perfect adversaries, and the settler family caught between them like pieces on a chessboard provide a humanizing "in" to their conflict. This film is 78 minutes of flat-out adventure, and I don't care if Scott winds up the same man he was when he set out. I was just happy to ride with him for a while.

PS One of my childhood influences was a retired stuntman. Watching this film's professionally exact horse falls, horse charges, cliff falls, fights, and gunfights made me nostalgic for the days he'd tell stories of working on these kinds of pictures. I love my job, but if I had to pick another, I'd have loved to be a stuntman during the golden age of westerns. In fact, one of my fondest memories is of the time I directed an entry in Calico Ghost Town's stunt show competition. We won that year. So maybe SEVEN MEN FROM NOW really stinks, and I just loved it because it granted me 78 minutes of golden reverie. It doesn't matter. As far as I'm concerned, this is a great movie.