The Hangover

THE HANGOVER is thin, but I laughed all the way through it. It isn't the best comedy I've seen so far this year, but it meets its goals.

Here's the setup: it's the day of the wedding. The best man; rumpled, bleeding, and standing in the middle of the desert; calls the bride and tells her, "We screwed up. We can't find Doug. I don't think the wedding's going to happen." We rewind to the beginning of the road trip, with four guys in a car on their way to Vegas for Doug's bachelor party, and away we go.

It's a fine setup for a movie, but so much depends on how far the filmmakers are willing to go to get the laugh. Fortunately, they're willing to go as far as necessary, piling the ridiculous on to the disgusting on to the witty on to the sweet. Here's a movie with legitimate comic surprises, well-delivered dialogue, and sight gags that work in themselves and as part of the larger narrative.

So I laughed, laughed, and laughed some more. But I already feel the movie slipping away. Unlike ROLE MODELS, the funniest thing I've seen in recent memory, it didn't have anything in it to hook me, to hang on to my imagination as I left the theater. The film is the cinematic equivalent of ice cream: fun while it lasts, but quickly forgotten.

Still, I can live with that. As long as you're in the theater, THE HANGOVER is a good time. That's good enough for me.

JCVD

JCVD is one weird picture. I like it.

In JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself, or a dramatically enhanced version of himself. His career is going nowhere: he just lost a part he didn’t want to Steven Seagal. His personal life is a shambles: he just lost a custody battle. His finances are ruined: he just bounced a check and he can’t get his plastic to work. So he does what anyone might do. He goes home to Brussels and goes to a bank to withdraw some of the money he knows is there. Problem is, he walks into a bank robbery.

There’s a passage in I Am Jackie Chan in which Jackie talks about a time when the studio at which he was filming got shaken down by the local mob. He was walking to work and was just outside the studio’s gate when three thugs approached with menace in their eyes. Jackie ran. Why? Because there’s a difference between stuntmen and thugs. Thugs can actually hurt you.

The guys robbing this bank are (in the context of the film, of course) real thugs with real guns that can actually kill people. Van Damme is quickly subdued and put with the other unfortunate hostages who happened to be around that day. Then the robbers realize they have a quite a bargaining chip, even a potential fall guy, and resolve to exploit him as best they can.

And there’s your movie. Van Damme is stripped of his bravado, his freedom, his remaining dignity. The film is a merciless flagellation of its star’s screen persona, offscreen missteps, and even purpose in life. It’s the most courageous thing Van Damme has ever done, requiring a level of dedication and honesty to which he may never before have subjected himself. And even if it isn’t entirely honest, even if it does wear a veil of fiction, what self-appraisal doesn’t?

JCVD didn’t turn me into a Van Damme fan: the guy makes DTV action pictures that don’t capture my imagination any more. But it did alert me to the possibility that there’s more to this guy than I thought. I look forward to his next serious picture. I hope he gets the chance to make one.

Breathless

Ok, I get it. I'm a terrible, bad person. I have no taste. I'm a vulgarian: the guy who shot off the Sphinx's nose.

BREATHLESS bored the hell out of me.

There were all these things about it that I know I was supposed to appreciate: the innovative use of jump cuts, the romantic amorality of its leads, its impact on cinema history. But the movie lost me the moment Jean-Paul Belmondo shot the cop, and that was only something like five minutes in. From there, I felt trapped as the spectator who watches a man fritter away his remaining moments of freedom. Not only did I want him to get caught because I wanted the son of a bitch to get what was coming to him, I wanted him to get caught because I knew that was the only way the film could (mercifully) end.

But this is an important film. It's the kind of film people study in school. It's one of those movies that taught the Boomers how to be cool. I understand that it's important, but I'm not in school, I'm not a Boomer, and I'm already cool.

Having said that, I'm open to the possibility that there's more there, that this is a film that can improve with study. Perhaps they'll offer a class in it when I wind up at Leisure World a few decades hence. Until then, this film represents only another Classic checked off the list.

Drag Me to Hell

DRAG ME TO HELL is everything I look for in a movie entitled DRAG ME TO HELL. It's scary. It's funny. It even has someone (perhaps more than one) being dragged to Hell.

I started out liking this movie: it had a likeable protagonist, a hammy medium, the borderline ubiquitous Justin Long, a gypsy curse, and even a slimy coworker whom we'd really like to see get dragged to Hell in place of the aforementioned protagonist. There was some great gross out stuff, good music, and general sense of a film that knew how to be scary without taking itself too seriously.

Let me tell you when I crossed over to loving this movie: the séance scene. [Oh, come on. That's not a spoiler. How could a Gypsy Curse movie called DRAG ME TO HELL not have a séance scene?] The medium did her thing. Puffs of air made the draperies in the ridiculously over the top chamber billow. Heavy objects moved around. Even ghosts appeared. And then the possession began. I swear to God, I half expected a spectral kitchen sink to show up! This is when I knew (not that I ever doubted) that Raimi was entirely prepared to go over the top, stick the landing, then come around and go over the top again.

So yeah, this is a genre film called DRAG ME TO HELL. But it's as good as genre films get, made by a guy who knows how to create a good time at the movies. It wouldn't take much to drag me back for another screening.

Frost/Nixon

FROST/NIXON captured my imagination from beginning to end. It took interesting people through definitive moments in their lives and the life of the nation, immersed us in their stories, and executed the impossible task of generating tension in a scenario whose conclusion we already know. And it does it while avoiding the talkfest trap so common to adaptations of successful plays.

Look, Nixon's interesting and we all know Frank Langella can act. So the movie's two strikes up in the count coming right out of the pen. But David Frost, the vapid talk show host who gets lucky with a big fish? And Michael Sheen to play him? Well, Sheen's a revelation. In THE QUEEN, he *was* Tony Blair, with all that entails. In FROST/NIXON, he does a David Frost whose shallowness hides depths of ambition and desperation that may be hidden even to himself. This guy's got range, and he also just got on to my "actors to watch" list. He makes David Frost, cheeseball tv performer, a hero the audience can get behind, and we relish the comparisons and contrasts with Langella's controlled, savvy, but lost Nixon.

Director Ron Howard handles those comparisons and contrasts, the heart of the movie, simply enough for a mainstream audience yet maturely enough for smart people like us. His direction, never flashy, borders on documentarian; and it gives the picture the realism it needs while remaining cinematic.

This is a quality film.

Gran Torino

Nick Schenk, the writer of GRAN TORINO, once told an interviewer how pleased he was that Clint Eastwood didn’t change a word of his script. More’s the shame, as it could have used a polish.

For example, there’s a scene in which Eastwood’s bigoted character is a guest in the home of his neighbors, Hmong immigrants. After some trepidation, he has discovered that he likes these people, feels more at ease with them than he does his own children and grandchildren. Ok, we’re fine so far. But then he goes into a bathroom, looks into a mirror, and says, “I have more in common with these people than I do my own family.” What was that, for the people who went out for popcorn? We’re watching the movie. You’re a good enough actor to portray the paradigm shift. You don’t have to tell us what we just saw.

The whole movie’s like that: solid material undercut by unnecessary dialogue. Just when we’re lost in the drama, something comes along that yanks us right out, something that could’ve been smoothed out with just one more pass through the word processor. As it is, GRAN TORINO is merely a good movie, with Eastwood playing on his persona to tell a story about a man who has carried his burdens so long and so passionately, it seems they’re carrying him. I bought his character’s arc even as I groaned at the script’s shortcomings, and I enjoyed the film even as I noticed its flaws.

GRAN TORINO isn’t going to change your life. It’s a little shaggy. But I’d watch Eastwood fold laundry. I liked this movie despite its flaws.