Lonely on the Top

When Art Movies go Bad
By
Morgan P Salvo

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has garnered respect over the years for his long list of eclectic and stylish movies, including The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica and Felicia’s Journey. Now with Chloe, his newest entry into the erotically charged pseudo-thriller genre, Egoyan cannot rest on his laurels, as his reputation will certainly backpedal as a result of Chloe, one of the most tedious movies I’ve had the displeasure of seeing.
Chloe begins promising enough, with Amanda Seyfried adorning black stockings and garters in soft-focused photography resembling a Penthouse magazine cover. While we listen to her monologue rationalizing why it’s perfectly acceptable to be a prostitute because it’s rewarding to be someone’s dream girl, we stop and think, “How farfetched is this going to be?”

Based on the much more subtle and philosophical 2003 French film, Nathalie, Chloe was adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Fur) and tells of a married couple consisting of gynecologist, Catherine (Julianne Moore) and professor, David (Liam Neeson). The two are drifting apart and also take turns ignoring their musical prodigy son, Michael (Max Thieriot). After David misses his own surprise birthday party and Catherine finds a suggestive photo on his phone, she becomes suspicious. Taking a page from Senator Larry Craig’s book, she has a chance encounter in a bathroom stall with a prostitute, Chloe (Seyfried), whom she later hires to seduce her husband to see if he’s cheating. Catherine is turned on by the recounted sex stories and this turns into a steamy lesbian affair that gets out of control leading to a pathetic plot twist reminiscent of Fatal Attraction and Poison Ivy.Too many logical questions arise. First, why not hire a private investigator rather than a prostitute? That answer is of course simplistically easy--the PI version wouldn't allow so may steaming-hot girl-on-girl action.The twist involving these hot-and-bothered sex stories is so ridiculous that I had it figured out right away because, hey, if a hooker tells a story without proof, how do you know what to believe? When Chloe seduces Michael to become closer to his mother, the plot goes from stupid to ludicrous. Egoyan expects us to buy all of this by counterbalancing the film’s heated impulses with what he perceives as cool visual sophistication and sparse production design, all delivered without a dose of humor.
The acting was passable, considering they’re not winking at the camera and laughing at themselves. Moore likes to play troubled and conflicted, but that veneer is wearing thin. Neeson had some redeeming to do after getting “Taken” in his last movie, and here he holds his stoic own. It was nice to see Seyfried take on a sexier adult role. She manages to let us believe her simplistic, positive thinking, even as the script calls on her to rationalize her life as a prostitute. She finds, “something to love in everyone, even if it’s the smallest thing. I mean, there’s got to be something, right?” Yeah right, think positive and anyone with dough can slobber all over you.
Chloe is full of weird imbalances. All the scenes are lazily hacked together with a mild art-house feel, like it’s too slick for its own good and the sweeping epic Disney-meets-Hitchcock soundtrack is more annoying than creative.
Chloe is neither an erotic mystery nor dramatic thriller—it’s a soft-core porn dysfunctional hooker story steeped in melodrama, told in shorthand and played out in bad ideas. There are two depraved morals to this story. 1) The family that screws together stays together and 2) When all the cards are on the table, it’s make out time. Though it sounds sexist, the only decent scenes are the sex scenes, but trust me —they aren’t that good either.

Chloe
Starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried
Directed by Atom Egoyan
½ star

Repossess This! --- New Hearts and Minds, plus Livers, Kidneys, Spleens etc…

Harvesting Organs Reduces Repo Men to the Sum of its Bloody Parts
by
Morgan P Salvo


Sharing nothing in common with Alex Cox’s 1984 punk-rock-crazy Repo Man and more aligned with Darren Lynn Bousman’s 2008 Repo!: The Genetic Opera, this Repo Men has some wit, violence and gore, but also some problems. Like Saw VI this is provides commentary on the current health care debate, mainly that health care reform requires extreme sacrifice.

Repo Men introduces us to the future with a news voice over montage of how things came to be: global recession, fifth stage of war in Nigeria, technological breakthroughs. A corporation called “The Union” manufactures technologically sophisticated artificial organs, or “artiforgs", marketed and sold to gullible customers at exorbitant prices. The down side lies in the fine print that if payments aren’t made, hot-shot repo men are sent to violently cut open and yank out whatever organ has been replaced fatally reclaiming it with no concern for resulting pain or death. The twist comes when Remy (Jude Law), one of The Union’s best repo men, suffers cardiac failure on the job and, thereby awakens with a new gizmo for a heart and a huge debt to pay. The irony is that with his new heart he finds difficulty doing his job - let’s say his heart’s just not in it. When he can’t make payments the bulk of the movie follows Remy on the run from the corporation he used to work for and then predictably Remy’s former partner and best friend Jake (Forest Whitaker) is sent to track him down.

Resembling Blade Runner’s futuristic world and scratching the surface of Robocop’s sense of humor via billboard ads and commercials it’s actually more of a run of the mill stereotypical-buddy-cop-action movie; you know the kind where they would lay down their life for each other and their competitive spirit makes wives jealous. Repo Men is stranded somewhere between Freebie and the Bean and Logan’s Run
Director Miguel Sapochnik takes us on a slow journey only to liven it up with flying bullets, blood spewing, and some wacky punch-fests, all which seem to be derived from a myriad of better movies. One nice touch was an old-school fight scene between Whitaker and Law, without a ton of jump cuts and speeding camera angles. Sapochnik delivers a high-tech future reality juxtaposed against decay and colonies of non-paying passed-due account organ holders hiding in abandoned warehouses and squalor. Interspersed throughout there are also at least three decent scenes. Sounding like David Bowie crooning over clinically blood soaked images the musical score uses weird rock to enhance certain unbelievably tedious scenes like the gory-blood-letting stomach-churning body-part scanning love scene near the end.
Law gets close to being tough and vulnerable at the same time, but as an action hero? He seems to have fun as a mean, buff macho-dude, but it’s hard to buy his kick-ass tough guy. His knife-wielding killing machine is downright laughable. Alice Braga (City of God) as Remy’s love interest only slightly pulls off the task of being sexy, homeless and bionic. Whitaker is cuddly-yet-murderous, but we know he can do this kind of nice-guy-with-hidden-emotional-baggage in his sleep. Carice van Houten (Black Book) as Remy’s wife is reduced by a poor script into being nothing but a hateful bitch. And Liev Shreiber, once again a cartoonish villain, hams it up as the CEO of The Union.
Repo could succeed if it wasn’t all over the map. Too many questions arise, like, “If he gained a conscience along with the new heart why then does he kill more people?” With a laundry list of discrepancies and a narration containing a zillion holes, the ridiculous twist ending eradicates most of what you’ve been watching, diminishing it into an entirely different concept. The almost redeemable ending has us understand why it didn’t make any sense for so long. If Repo Men followed its instincts there was real potential to join the ranks of Blindness and District 9. Missing the opportunity to have fun with all recent political implications and coming off as a generic fable is bewildering. Action thriller or social satire, what this flick needs is a celluloid bionic makeover or better yet, to be repossessed.

Repo Men
Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Shreiber, Alice Braga
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
2 stars

Democracy Now

Searching for Truth and WMDs Gives Action-thriller an Effective Cliffhanger Edge
By
Morgan P Salvo

The Green Zone is what action movies are supposed to look like. A suspenseful, high voltage in-your-face action drama with a plausible scenario may be the best action flick I’ve ever seen. And if film editor Christopher Rouse doesn’t get an academy award for his work, there is no justice in this world.
With a factual premise, Green Zone sets into motion that a U.S. Army officer went rogue after discovering faulty intelligence and was instrumental in blowing the lid off the truth behind WMDs during the same year the media, Pentagon and the White House were declaring ‘mission accomplished.’ Based on nonfiction book by former Washington Post Baghdad chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City”, the movie takes its cues from the ignorance and objectives that came from inside the Green Zone, a safety area including the old Republican Palace where American decision-makers were cut off from Iraqi reality.
Green Zone literally starts with a bang, depicting hyper-realistic shock and awe. The audience is thrown smack dab into the middle of sniper fire, and spends the rest of the flick trying to keep up with the frenetic pace. Army Chief Miller (Matt Damon) begins to doubt Pentagon “Intel” when his unit fails to find WMDs. This pits him against Defense Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) and his mission to reshape Iraq into American-style democracy. CIA Station-Chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) cryptically gives Miller a hand and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) asks him to search for a confidential source called "Magellan". Miller doesn't like what he hears, eventually moving from one clue, source or battle to the next. Thrown into the mix are an Iraqi cab driver turned-translator Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) and a hunt from all sides to find Al Rawi (Yigal Naor) aka “the Jack of Clubs” (from the terrorist card deck).

Green Zone explores media deceit and the Bush administration's willingness to embrace blatant lies over shadowy truths to sell the Iraq War to the American public but regardless of the huge political agenda it’s the unrelenting nail-biting race against time pace that drives this movie. By now it is common knowledge that the pretext of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was a fabrication. The crux of this movie is what a soldier must do when he discovers that his mission is based on a lie. Bombarded from all sides Miller tries to stay one step ahead of the confusing and dangerous events that transpire.
Damon, in constant motion, draws every detail of the bedlam into his character’s trajectory. Damon’s range as an actor is getting more impressive every movie he makes. From comedy, action or intense drama, he always skillfully pulls it off. Kinnear does a superb job of being despicable and the always dependable Gleason is weirdly compelling. Naor seethes with mesmerizing intensity and Abdalla nails his tension filled pivotal role.

Director Paul Greengrass (Bourne Identity/United 93) amps his talent for raw, unrelenting, uncompromising cinema verite with spellbinding terseness, while cinematographer Barry Ackroyd turns locations in Spain, Morocco and the U.K. into a realistic Iraq, the chaos and devastating destruction vividly depicting Baghdad’s crumbling infrastructure. John Powell's heart pounding soundtrack propels this movie to insanely large heights as the stunts, chases, fights, avalanches of bullets, explosions and hit you full force.

The uncompromising vision traps us in this never ending war-zone-powder-keg of an espionage flick, bringing everything to the forefront, or as one officer says “Democracy’s messy, soldier.” The Iraq war has never been depicted with such realistic intensity, or edge-of-your-eat action. The last riveting intense chase scene had me literally slapping my knee--- it was filled with that much relentlessly over-the-top exhilaration. Green Zone has raised the bar. This film rocks.

The Green Zone
Starring Matt Damon, Brendon Gleason, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla
Directed by Paul Greengrass
 4 stars

The Righter and The Wronger

Flying Bullets Dispense Final Justice In Crawling Melodrama
by
 Morgan P Salvo

Going into Brooklyn’s Finest I didn’t expect something special but I came out somewhat amazed at how bland it really was. It’s a lame attempt at combining Training Day and Crash, coming off like a mediocre television crime drama.Finest begins with an ominous black car silhouetted in front of NY cityscape, kicked off by Vincent D’Onofrio delivering a foreboding monologue about what’s “righter and wronger” in the fight between lawmakers and lawbreakers. We lose his character quickly but then the trio of stories and characters begin. We get Dugan (Richard Gere), a drunken suicidal “doesn’t-give-a-shit” loser cop with seven days left before retirement and Sal (Ethan Hawke), a Catholic guilt ridden, crooked, sociopathic narcotics cop ready to kill and swindle money for the good of his pregnant wife and growing family. Then there’s Tango (Don Cheadle), a conflicted undercover cop deep into the projects drug scene, dealing with the dilemma of busting his long lost pal Caz (Wesley Snipes) who once saved his life. Tango and Caz…get it? Other stereotypical characters are Will Patton as the grizzled nice guy detective and Ellen Barkin, resembling a cornered bulldog, doing her tough-mama-agent routine.

The slow paced bleakness that Brooklyn’s tries to convey at times comes off like Scarface on Quaaludes. Amidst an obvious Mean Streets set up that never really attaches itself to the overall flow, the bullet hailing and slug-fest eruptions only seem to bend backwards on the storyline and fall flat. Languishing in cliché city, the dichotomies run rampant with really bad writing mixed with inventive street lingo. To spice things up there are a fair amount of bullet holes and blood oozing. The pathos and righteousness is ladled on so thick that it begins to stagnate. When all these characters finally intersect, it’s too late to care. In a good ensemble piece movie we’re supposed to feel empathy or sympathy with most of the prominently shown characters. Here we’re numb to people who deserve everything they get because at base they are all despicable. What’s needed was to amp up the stakes by making this a more engaging feature for the audience-- this is just another case of watching reprehensible guys squirm. Wesley Snipes garners the most sympathy and he’s a gang drug lord--- go figure.
The actors give what they might consider Oscar winning performances. What we see is heavy handed EMOTING. Wherein director Antoine Fuqua in Training Day had Denzel smacking you upside the head with his over-the-top performance, here we only get glimmers of that kind of bravura as the three leads slow burn their way into self inflicted sorrow, deep guilt, suffering and eventually tantrums. Snipes’ phoned in performance from a six year screen absence is a let down.
I can just see first timer scriptwriter Michael C. Martin, who grew up in the Brooklyn projects saying, “And then they will all meet in a hail of bullets in the projects and justice will be dispensed.” But sadly it just feels pushed, contrived and washed out. Face it, from Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant to Hill Street Blues we’ve seen all this before. While Finest is supposed to be gritty and heavy it’s just another example of making a mess of things with no one to clean it up. This vapid melodrama lacks the intensity it strives for. While the audience is force fed the notion that everyone’s justified by taking crime or the law into their own hands, well, that’s just “wronger.” Fuqua develops sufficient sleazy atmosphere and propels some momentum during the final 30 minutes but it takes way too long to get there. But after wading through the muck of mediocrity it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

Brooklyn’s Finest
Starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
2 stars

Wacked Out

Remake of Bioterrorism Creep-fest has its moments
by
Morgan P Salvo

The Crazies, is based on the 1973 George A. Romero film of the same name, originally called “Code Name: Trixie”. Joining the ranks of newly remade apocalyptic scenarios, The Crazies has been given the remake treatment with Romero serving as executive producer. The original always struck me as the missing link between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, though this movie borrows only marginally and has a focused life of its own.

While Crazies'73 took place in Pennsylvania, this time the plot revolves around the inhabitants of Ogden Marsh, a small Iowa town, suddenly plagued by insanity and then death after a mysterious toxin contaminates their water supply. Beginning with a disheveled guy interrupting a kid’s softball game, carrying a shotgun and then a mortician attacking people with a bone-saw (the only other time I’ve seen that weapon of choice was Planet Terror), soon the Sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and deputy (Joe Anderson) figure out something is definitely wrong in their little community. Bouts of insanity are more frequent and are traced to whom started drinking the water first. Turns out a plane crashed into the town’s main river and military force has moved in and are dispensing martial law, taking no prisoners. They are literally wiping Ogden Marsh off the map along with all its inhabitants, infected or not. As in the 1973 classic, The Crazies uses victims driven insane by governmental chemical-warfare experiments in place of zombies but for the most part the results are the same. But wherein the first one was more politically motivated, dead set on making parallels to the Viet Nam War, the Kent State shootings, ongoing riots and other early-’70s conflicts, this Crazies is more personal, focusing on the Sheriff, his wife/town doctor’s (Radha Mitchell) plight against all odds. They are up against evil gas-mask wearing military on one side and vein-popping wide eyed crazies on the other…take your pick.

The music that starts out by Johnny Cash and ends with Willie Nelson gives this an arty, slow-paced, Dawn of the Dead's redux feel. Sandwiched in between are some decent moments and some requisite jolt scares, but the film seems to hold on to eerie scenes that create suspense and lean toward silent haunting rather than overkill. This doesn’t mean all the scenes are good. A few standouts are the scab-encrusted, trigger-happy duck-hunters-gone-berserk, a cool car wash scene that rivals any suspenseful horror movie scare and the aforementioned bone-saw massacre.
Brought to us from director Breck Eisner (who helmed the dreadful Sahara), The Crazies definitely has a semblance of style thanks to cinematographer Maxime Alexandre’s (High Tension) atmospheric touch. But it seems for every good thing an equally lame thing occurs. Some of the stronger scenes seem to chicken out. There’s some blood and gore but mostly of the afterthought kind. The choice was made more toward thrilling instead of visceral, allowing the blood splatter off-screen and a lot of death by soundtrack. Every scary shock is accompanied by insanely loud music. The infected go nicely maniacal but are not shown as often as in most zombie flicks, only to be revealed in startling out-of-nowhere close-ups. When they do get to wallow in their own insanity it’s a crap shoot as to what they are capable of. They don’t just eat brains; they like to mess with things via their warped-out id. Think of it as zombies sans inhibitions with an agenda.
Anderson (The Ruins) was fun to watch thanks to his handle on his character’s spiral-into-madness development. The rest of the acting was adequate amidst the bad dialogue but something about the persistence and interaction between the characters kept it alive and translated into the beat of the film. With only a mention of biological warfare and dropping any political undercurrents, The Crazies has a feel of the pod-induced sleep walking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both versions) combined with the campy hazmat blockbuster Outbreak. The Crazies, not a great movie by any standards, holds it own. In this day and age with the Michael Bay’s deafening crunch of everything re-made in 70’s horror, The Crazies was refreshingly sane.

The Crazies
Starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson
Directed Breck Eisner
2 ½ stars