Positive Liberty

Either Constant Viewer just saw Speed Racer or those LSD flashbacks he was promised in the 60s have finally arrived. Quite possibly the most visually stunning motion picture in decades and certainly the benchmark for special effects for the foreseeable future, Speed Racer is a movie which must either be seen at the biggest screen theater in your city or, at minimum, used as the excuse to run out and finally buy that big screen HDTV set. The only serious question here is, “But is it a good movie?”

Yes. Within the limitations discussed below, Speed Racer is a good movie, though not perhaps advisable for anyone with epilepsy or prone to motion sickness. The story is hardly nuanced and most of the characters are three dimensional only in the visual sense, but there are legitimate good guys fighting legitimate bad guys for legitimate reasons, plot-wise, and you might well just find yourself cheering on the good guys as the thrilling conclusion thrillingly concludes. True, the good guys are Speed and his family’s family business while the bad guys are, wait for it, evil corporations; but has anyone successfully switched that shopworn trope in anything actually literary (hence, Ayn Rand doesn’t count) since Major Barbara? Besides, there’s a funny monkey here, people!

Constant Viewer freely if abashedly admits he had every intention of hating Speed Racer. Why? In the first place, he hated the 1960s crappy cartoons — CV wasn’t hip enough to use words like “anime” back then — both because the animation was on a par with Clutch Cargo and because CV finds watching other people (including cartoon characters) driving fast cars either boring or frustrating. In the second place, Constant Viewer considers the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix sequels among the greatest artistic frauds ever perpetrated on the movie going public.

But fair’s fair. CV could start throwing out adjectives like dazzling, spectacular, mind boggling and so forth, or he could wend his way through a catalog of Speed Racer’s influences such as the color palette of Dick Tracy, the phantasmagorical animation of Fantasia, the mixed media of Tron and, of course, the entire history of Japanese manga and anime. That might, might, mind you, make CV sound like a more knowledgeable film reviewer – then again, it might make him sound like a kid reaching to pad a term paper in a film appreciation course – but it wouldn’t help convey the gape-mouthed reaction most viewers will probably have while watching Speed Racer.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the film is that, while it starts off with dazzling special effects, it manages to continue to build and outdo itself like a grand fireworks display. Frankly, Speed Racer is a good 20 minutes too long and (reminiscent of just about every Lucas film ever made) a bit too impressed by its own technical brilliance to pay adequate attention to the minimum dramatic requirements any genuinely good movie must have. CV knows he said roughly the same thing about Iron Man recently; but Speed Racer is a borderline experimental film and cannot be judged by mere summer blockbuster standards. By those standards and those standards alone, CV understands that many people will likely judge Speed Racer as an extravagant failure. Judged as a cinematic work of art, however, it’s sure to get serious critical attention long after the summer has come and gone. See it.

Daniel: Hey, what kind of belt do you have?
Miyagi: Canvas. JC Penney, $3.98. You like?
Daniel: [laughs] No, I meant…
Miyagi: In Okinawa, belt mean no need rope to hold up pants.
– The Karate Kid

Not unlike, although for mostly different reasons, David Lynch, many people find that a little David Mamet goes a long way. Constant Viewer likes Mamet’s work and thinks he is among our very finest contemporary American playwrights and screenwriters. As a director, however, the best thing that can be said about Mamet is that he’s a competent enough craftsman who, by default, is probably the best guy available when it comes to the particular task of filming a David Mamet screenplay.

Speaking of which, Mamet’s Redbelt is a bit of a puzzler even by Mamet standards. Oh, sure, it’s got the signature elliptical, overlapping dialog fragments, the scant bordering on nonexistent expository back story and the pervading undercurrent of surrealistic menace; but what, exactly, is it all about? Well, the IMDb says “A fateful event leads to a job in the film business for top mixed-martial arts instructor Mike Terry. Though his refuses to participate in prize bouts, circumstances conspire to force him to consider entering such a competition.”

Hmmm…. sounds like an action flick. Hey, what say we take a look at the official film site and see what (presumably) Mamet, himself, says about the movie:

Set in the west-side of Los Angeles fight world, a world inhabited by bouncers, cagefighters, cops and special forces types, Redbelt, is the story of Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Jiu-Jitsu teacher who has avoided the prize fighting circuit, choosing instead to pursue an honorable life by operating a self-defense studio with a samurai’s code.

Terry and his wife Sondra (Alicia Braga), struggle to keep the business running to make ends meet. An accident on a dark, rainy night at the Academy between an off duty officer (Max Martini) and a distraught lawyer (Emily Moritimer) puts in motion a series of events that will change Terry’s life dramatically introducing him to a world of promoters (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna) and movie star Chet Frank (Tim Allen). Faced with this, in order to pay off his debts and regain his honor, Terry must step into the ring for the first time of his life.

An accident on a dark, rainy night, eh? Circumstances conspire? Wait a minute. This is a Mamet flick, so maybe, just maybe the only truthful word in both those phrases is “conspire.”

Unless you, dear reader, have never seen a Mamet film before, it is hardly a spoiler to acknowledge that not everything is as it seems and this means, first and foremost in this case, that whatever Redbelt is, it isn’t an action movie. Yes, there is the de rigueur ‘big fight’ at the end — because, apparently, not a single security guard at the arena had even so much as a stun gun — taking place not inside but right next to the ring. Did Mamet see Never Back Down or was that truly terrible movie’s screenwriter, Chris Hauty, channeling Mamet? In any case, calling a David Mamet film an action movie is like calling most of Woody Allen’s later movies comedies, technically correct but highly misleading.

Ah, but Mamet probably enjoys being highly misleading. In fact, he’s pretty much made a career out of it. Increasingly, in fact, a David Mamet movie is becoming more and more like a Woody Allen movie in that it predictably serves a tiny and quite possibly shrinking niche market. CV wouldn’t mind even that, were the ‘accident’ that sets Redbelt’s ‘conspiring circumstances’ into motion not, itself, an utterly implausible motive force. (Note to Mamet: Yes, we do, in fact, live in a police state now; but, no, merely accidentally firing a handgun in a panicked response to an unidentified police officer is not attempted murder.)

Mixed martial arts movie fans will be disappointed by most of the fight scenes in Redbelt, while the rest of us, those of us who are not utterly bewildered, will be disappointed by the rest of the movie. If you don’t bother fastening Redbelt in the first place, you can just avoid the bumpy ride.

One of Constant Viewer’s many pet peeves is the superfluous rutting scene all R rated movies are apparently required by law to include. One of the few things Deception has going for it is that its montage of carnal abandon is at least tenuously related to the story. Alas, aside from a bit of cameo rutting by the still sexy in her sixties Charlotte Rampling, the sex scenes are on a par with the rest of Deception. As a purely formal matter, the movie falls in the suspense or thriller, drama and romance genres; but anyone claiming any legitimacy to such descriptions would be guilty of a far worse act of deception than this tepid yet overwrought Ewen McGregor and Hugh Jackman vehicle.

A case can be made for the proposition that neither Jet Li nor Jackie Chan has won the American audiences their talents deserve. While Jet Li’s martial arts skills may be more to the purist’s tastes, Chan boasts not only superb skills and a choreographer’s sensibility but genuine comedic talent, to boot. The Forbidden Kingdom is their first collaboration and it is a sheer treat to watch them work together. Even if martial arts movies are not your cup of tea (and especially if the only such film you ever saw was when someone dragged you off to Crouching Captions Tiger, Hidden Wires Dragon), Constant Viewer would be surprised if you didn’t like The Forbidden Kingdom and especially surprised if your pre-teen didn’t find the “rainmaker” bit the funniest thing he’s ever seen.

Speaking of pre-adolescent humor, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay may just be the best or at least the second best Harold and Kumar movie ever. Constant viewer gave a pass on Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle but he has seen The Odd Couple, Slackers and enough Cheech & Chong and Kevin Smith movies to get it. There are a half dozen solid laughs in Escape even if you’re not stoned or don’t find Neil Patrick Harris per se hilarious. If you are and you do, well, you won’t be disappointed, dude.

Iron Man grossed just a tad short of $100 million on its opening weekend, ushering in the summer movie season with its first big hit. Nothing Constant Viewer could possibly write at this point can change that fact even given his huge influence with literally dozens of potential moviegoers, but it must nonetheless be said that, however many good things there may be about Iron Man, they do not all add up to make a good movie.

Here’s the thing. Superhero origin movies are difficult at best to pull off such that (1) preexisting fans’ canonical expectations are satisfied while (2) the non-cognoscenti walk out thinking they saw a self-contained piece of entertainment. There must, after all, ultimately be more going on than simply how Spandex Man came to be tarted up in special effects, and that something more is technically defined as a story.

In Iron Man, that story is that fabulously wealthy, genius playboy arms merchant Tony Stark idiotically demonstrates his company’s latest weapon system in the Middle East as opposed to, say, Arizona, thereby idiotically permitting himself to be kidnapped by Middle Eastern bad guys who, for reasons of estimated impact on total world grosses, are only generically anti-American and whose leader is perfectly willing to cut a deal with an even badder and, for reasons of estimated impact on total world grosses, decidedly non-Middle Eastern bad guy.

Necessity being the mother of invention, the injured Stark manages despite being held captive in a cave to upgrade in a week or so from the world’s least portable pacemaker to a dilithium crystal powered flux capacitor, to cobble together sufficient armor plating to deflect his captives’ conventional yet hardly insignificant firepower and, oh by the way, to jury-rig a Wily Coyote type jetpack to propel him sufficiently far from the bad guys to escape without, as a result, killing himself on impact, too. So far we can all agree it’s pretty plausible, no?

Anyway, to make a long (and largely tedious) story mercifully shorter, Stark survives, develops a guilty conscience about the fact that his weapons are being used to kill white people, too, and swiftly progresses through the three classic comic book Iron Man looks with the help of a robotic arm with more personality than half the rest of the cast. The obligatory super-villain emerges and, not a moment too soon, a battle ensues. When the CGI dust settles the sequel is set up.

Look, casting Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark was a stroke of genius and it was wonderful that Downey could work the film into his schedule between rehabs. Gwyneth Paltrow’s quasi-romantic interest works well, giving Paltrow’s much publicized stiletto heel fetish an opportunity to be put on display on the talk show circuit. Jeff Bridges plays the unhappy arms merchant partner and Terrance Howard plays the sympathetic black man role as well as their parts permit. The directing, camera work and special effects are brisk and effective. In fact, everything about Iron Man works except Iron Man. Taken as a whole, it is simply too predictable to engender the slightest bit of dramatic tension from the point where Stark escapes from the cave.

The fact is that Iron Man is splashy and big-screen worthy and just about everything a summer blockbuster should be except a good movie. If you haven’t seen it already, by all means don’t let Constant Viewer stop you. But don’t say he recommended it, either.

Writing for the Village Voice (!), reviewer J. Hoberman says Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay “is a largely mind-numbing experience.”

[Insert obvious and entirely unnecessary stoner joke here.]

Letting their freak flags fly in the most mainstream of Mainstream Media, Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (which one is Felix and which is Oscar?) grace the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with a paean to Dallas. No, not the next door neighbor of the NFL’s soon-to-be Arlington Cowboys, but the execrable prime time soap opera that premiered 30 years ago and, as Gillespie and Welch would have it, helped the West win the Cold War and, alas, abetted the political ascension of George W. Bush. Every silver lining must have its cloud, I suppose.

Dallas’s contribution to the decline of both communism and presidential “couthness” aside, one point Gillespie and Welch failed to mention was how much the Ewing’s iconic Southfork Ranch was and still is a Potemkin Village. The ‘Mansion’ at Southfork Ranch is in fact a 4800 sq. ft. house with a 960 sq. ft. enclosed garage. Hardly a hovel but frankly smallish by comparison with some nearby Plano, TX neighborhoods and positively snug compared to the actual Dallas’s ostentatious Preston Hollow neighborhood.

Southfork serves today as a conference center and tourist attraction. I admit to not having made the trek, myself; but my wife has been to several events there and, at the risk of putting words in her mouth, described the facility as surprisingly small and unimpressive. Then again, having been chauffeured through a part of rural Russia a few years ago where our driver pulled over to negotiate at length, unsuccessfully as it turned out, with a roadside truck stand selling cabbage, what impresses is very much in the eye of the beholder. Dallas may have been, as Texans are wont to say, all hat and no cattle, but at least it showed the rest of the world what it was like to live in America always having more than enough cabbage.

A reader recently bemoaned the tendency of some actors to take virtually any role, and it must certainly be admitted that some have made poor career choices over the years. Then, too, some actors simply get hot for a while and, having wandered in the wilderness for so long, understandably cash in while the cashing in is good. For example, there was a time not so long ago when it seemed like Samuel L. Jackson was in every new movie almost by act of law. And one would have to note that the admittedly quirky but wonderfully talented Michael Keaton, once considered as bright a star as Tom Hanks, has done himself no great favor by taking some of the roles he has played over the years.

But probably no other working actor can seriously rival the now seventy-five year old Michael Caine when it comes to his thoroughly working-class attitude toward his career. “You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one,” he’s been quoted as saying. It isn’t true, of course, especially if people begin to believe you’re the reason the film is bad; but, still, he has a point. Having already acted in nearly forty movies before his mid-1960s breakout roles in The Ipcress File and Alfie, Caine has gone on to work in nearly a hundred movies since. “I’ve made an awful lot of films. In fact, I’ve made a lot of awful films.” Indeed he has. Then again, only Jack Nicholson can also brag of having been nominated for an acting Oscar in every decade since the 1960s. Caine has been nominated four times for best leading actor and won twice for best supporting actor in Hannah And Her Sisters (1986) and The Cider House Rules (1999).

Caine once famously contended that his fellow British actors Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris were all drunks whose love of the bottle had harmed their careers. There is certainly some truth to this, at least in the case of the wonderfully double-phallic monikered O’Toole. Still, Richard Harris’s retort that Caine was “an over-fat, flatulent … windbag, a master of inconsequence now masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues” probably served as good publicity for both men. And say whatever ill you might about Michael Caine, he never subjected the world to anything nearly as hideous as Harris’s tortured ’singing’ of MacArthur Park.

In 2007, Caine pretty much closed the circle of his career, playing Andrew to Jude Law’s Milo in a regrettably forgettable remake of Harold Pinter’s Sleuth. Thirty-five years earlier, Caine played Milo to Laurence Olivier’s Andrew in the far better 1972 original film version. Oh well. Another day, another dollar.

Yet another small movie Caine filmed in 2007 but which was only recently and not widely released is Flawless. As heist movies, period movies or Demi Moore movies go, probably the most significant thing about Flawless is that it conclusively marks Moore’s transition in her mid-forties to more, well, more mature roles. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Lord knows Moore is a talented enough actor to deserve that sort of second-stage career usually denied most screen actresses and CV thinks she is quite good here. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with and much to commend about Flawless, including a fine performance by the under-appreciated Joss Ackland. But what makes the movie so much more fun than, taken as a whole, it probably should is Caine’s wonderful and seemingly effortless performance. (CV won’t stoop to calling it flawless; even CV has some standards!) You’ll probably miss Flawless at the Bijou, but it’s worth a rental when the DVD is released just to appreciate Caine’s quiet mastery of his trade.

How fun it must be to wake up in the morning as a seventy-five year old and know that as long as your physical and mental health hold out there are films still to be made, a job of work yet to be done for which, by the way, the pay ain’t half bad. Later this year Caine will reprise his role as Batman’s butler, Alfred. It’s not, perhaps, the sort of role one could ever imagine seeing Burton or Olivier play. But John Gielgud, another English actor whose Hamlet was considered better than Burton’s or Olivier’s and who won an Oscar in his mid-70s playing a butler, went on acting for nearly another 20 years after that. After all, as the Prince of Denmark was so fond of saying, the play’s the thing.

88 Minutes opened last week to what can only be called abysmal reviews, earning Metacritic’s Critic composite score of 17 out of 100 with a barely better User rating of 2 out of 10. For example, the New York Post’s Kyle Smith writes that “88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.”

This leads Constant Viewer to assume, by the way, that Kyle Smith is among the vast majority of Americans who never actually watched Gigli and who, thankfully, long ago forgot Scent of a Woman. However, having now actually watched 88 Minutes, CV is nonetheless inclined to find fault in Mr. Smith’s clever summary only in that 88 Minutes barely qualifies as a movie at all.

Let’s be clear about this: if Al Pacino was not in this movie, it would be neck and neck with Paris Hilton’s laughably pathetic The Hottie and The Nottie in opening box office gross receipts. As it is, a couple more dogs like this and Mr. Pacino might just as well co-star with Ms Hilton in a sequel to her sex tape yelling “Hoo Haw!” as he rides her like an anorexic bucking bronco.

But enough of 88 Minute’s high points, let us move on to note its screenplay, which is complete rubbish, and its directing, which is painfully inept. If CV didn’t know better, he’d think both screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson and director Jon Avnet were pseudonyms for M. Night Shyamalan.

Picture, if you will, a rich and famous forensic psychiatrist — because, as we all know, the big money in medicine is in giving expert testimony for the prosecution in serial killers’ trials — situated in Seattle because, aside from some family unpleasantness back in New York, all that coffee makes Seattle’s high serial killer population unusually jittery and thus more likely to throw Pacino’s character some business. Beautiful, young women throw themselves at him because, um, because, well, maybe because he’s a rich and famous doctor and then again maybe just because he’s Al Pacino, whose 68th birthday just happens to be today and who thirty-five years ago looked like Michael Corleone.

Public servant to the end, our hero divides his time between his fabulously successful and ultra modern private forensic psychiatry practice complete with beautiful lesbian administrative assistant and his teaching gig at Northern Washington University. (How bad does a film have to be before Seattle’s University of Washington refuses the free publicity of letting its name be used? Whatever the benchmark, 88 Minutes easily surpasses it.) Sure he’s a hard grader but he’s also a hard partier, gosh darn it, and his students, who are all so physically attractive that they got a wonderful group deal on Apple Power Macs, include a young and beautiful teaching assistant. Alas, our hero soon discovers that one of his not quite yet executed serial killers oddly enough still holds a grudge against him and, as they say in the trade, preposterous complications ensue.

The best thing that can be said about 88 Minutes is that it provides 108 minutes worth of distractions. The viewer is distracted, for example, from the completely incredible plot by the outrageously over-the-top acting, then suddenly distracted by the stilted and entirely unrealistic dialog, only to be distracted by the awkward camera work and so on and so forth until, in what seems like little more than four or five hours, 88 Minutes is finally over. Hoo Haw!

When Pulp Fiction was first released, Constant Viewer’s longstanding friend and Reason Magazine’s science correspondent, Ronald Bailey asked him if the Tarantino’s masterpiece was very graphically violent. “It isn’t,” CV took care to reply, “gratuitously violent.” CV has it on good authority that Mr. Bailey decided on that basis not to go and see the movie. His loss.

Much more recently, however, Mr. Bailey did go to see Ben Stein’s new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Mr. Bailey reviews the film here and, as a result, Constant Viewer will not have to go see it. His gain, and now we’re even!

UPDATE: Hat tip to one of the Usual Suspects over at Reason’s “Hit & Run,” here’s a bit of fun for those who think Creationism has gotten a Bad Rap!

Constant Viewer not only views movies, he observes them. Thus, for example, CV notices that Hugh Laurie, a huge star on television in House, is not yet a film star of any sort because his character in Street Kings is visibly balding. CV also notices that director David Ayer still isn’t clear on the concept of talent or, for that matter, directing anything but jerky action scenes, as he abruptly cuts a powerful and captivating close up scene of Forest Whitaker while letting the camera linger lovingly on the finally aging visage of Keanu Reeves running the gambit of his three available expressions for no particular reason. Forest Whitaker is one of the finest actors alive, but if you combine Whitaker and Reeves and divide by two you nonetheless get, at best, an actor of average talent.

In truth, however, Keanu Reeves doesn’t suck in Street Kings or, if he does, it doesn’t matter because James Ellroy’s and Kurt Wimmer’s plot sucks so much more it distracts the viewer from any of the film’s other failings. There may be viewers who fail to predict the remainder of the movie once Reeves’ character’s former partner is killed. There man even be one or two who don’t see where the plot is going and how it will all end by the time the third caliber bullet is revealed, but that only goes to show that, just like the White House, there is obviously no minimum I.Q. required for admission.

That’s not to say that Street Kings has no redeeming qualities at all. As shoot-em-up’s pretending to be suspenseful films go, it’s a C + to B – sort of movie. Whitaker is always fun to watch, Laurie probably should be a film star and Reeves doesn’t make a fool of himself. There’s a satisfying amount of graphic violence for those who enjoy such things and the pacing of the movie, plot aside, is brisk and satisfying. You could do worse and, what with a new M. Night Shyamalan movie opening soon, you probably will.

The first two things you must realize about Mick Jagger is that he is older than Constant Viewer is and in better shape than you are. (Yes, it is reasonable to infer from this that Mick is in vastly better shape than Constant Viewer.) CV doesn’t know how much Jagger personally nets per concert but, as Dick Cavett says at one point in archival film from the 1970s, he earns every damned penny of it. The last time CV saw the Stones live was, in fact, in 1975, fearing that if he didn’t grab the chance then, well, he might never get the chance again. Ha!

Martin Scorsese has a light and masterful touch in Shine a Light, using little archival footage but including obligatory scenes of Mick saying in interviews first in the 1960s that he thought the band had at least another year left in it and in another interview not much later that, yes indeed, he could easily see himself doing that thing that he does on stage in his sixties. And now so can we all. Probably the worst thing CV can say about this wonderfully filmed concert is that the Stones don’t play his favorite song, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Proving, as CV reluctantly admits, well, you know.

Shine a Light is first and foremost a concert film: a documentary of a day in the life of the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band” setting up and performing in 2006 at the Beacon Theater in New York. The Stones must be turkey neck and neck with Dylan at this point for most documentary films throughout their careers, but unlike XM Radio DJ Bob, Mick is completely comfortable in front of the camera and puts on a show that would make Richard Simmons drop dead from exhaustion.

It’s a great show beautifully filmed, capturing the energy, the chemistry and the sheer joy the Stones can still elicit both in each other as they play and in their exuberant audiences spanning all ages. Scorsese clearly loves his work here, hamming it up just a tad in bookending cameos and showing his own artistry by concluding the film with a masterful shot that pulls back from a closeup on Jagger climbing into a limo after the show until we see all of New York City ablaze with light and awash in a giant moon that morphs into the Stones’ most famous trademark.

Constant Viewer says Hell yes, go see it!

Hit me! Hit me again! Again! Just please, please don’t ever make me watch 21 again!

21 is the story of someone we can all identify with: the kind of poor struggling senior at MIT who has already been accepted at Harvard Medical School but can’t figure out how to pay for it (future Harvard MDs being such poor credit risks) until he is recruited into a card counting club that flies to Vegas on weekends, works the blackjack tables, indulges in a little partying and power shopping, then flies back to Cambridge in time for class on Monday morning. A regular Joe like you or me, in other words. And just like you or I would, he keeps his winnings in cash wrapped by rubber bands in plain sight above the suspended ceiling of his dorm room. College dorm rooms are, after all, famously private places and vastly safer than safety deposit boxes, not to mention his widowed mother’s house, apparently only a short commute away.

Like the rest of his MIT student card counting club, he is not only slightly smarter than the average Vegas gambler, he is also vastly more physically attractive, a fact that had heretofore been hidden back in Cambridge behind his expensive, preppy J. Press wardrobe.* Well, sure. When CV imagines a half dozen extremely attractive young high rollers, the first think that pops into his head is kids from M.I.T. You know, like Click and Clack from Car Talk and Richard Feynman – nonstop party animals! (Yes, CV knows Feynman actually did turn into a bit of a party animal eventually, but not as an undergraduate, fergawdsakes.)

And speaking of party animals, there’s Kevin Spacey as your typical M.I.T. professor. Well, assuming that the typical M.I.T. professor’s last name, if it isn’t Soze, is Moriarty. Oh, and in lieu of real action or dramatic tension there’s a bit of thuggery from Laurence Fishburne. Does he really need the work? Did he take all that Matrix money and put it on 21-Red to win?

21 claims to be “inspired by the true story of five students.” Hey, there’s even a book! CV just hopes the real kids took Vegas for more than 21 ‘wins’ from unsuspecting moviegoers but, life being what it is, he wouldn’t bet on it.

_______________

* Unless you are, yourself, something of an uber-prep who has also lived in New Haven, Cambridge, New York or Washington, you’ve probably never heard of J. Press before and are even now confusing it with J. Crew, the comparatively low-rent faux-preppy clothing chain that Old Navy would be if it sold button down collar shirts. How preppy is J. Press? Let’s put it this way, regular J. Press customers pop into the local Brooks Brothers when they need to pick up Christmas gifts for the servants. Constant Viewer doesn’t know how much money J. Press paid for this sort of product placement, but he wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn the store is on the verge of a major expansion and will be coming soon to a mall near you!

It’s time once again to dust off the turban and present that All-Seeing, All-Knowing, Mystic Seer, Sage of the East and part-time Bijou Theater ticket-taker…

DARnac the Magnificent!

May we have the first envelope please?

The Nanny Diaries

. . . . . . . . . . What’s the source of Democratic domestic policy?

No Country For Old Men

. . . . . . . . . . Describe Hillary’s bedroom.

The Number 23

. . . . . . . . . . How many TV ads do Hillary and Obama each run per hour?

Feast of Love

. . . . . . . . . . What will the Democrats pretend their convention will be?

There Will Be Blood

. . . . . . . . . . What will it really be like?

300

. . . . . . . . . . Give or take a century, how old is John McCain?

Across The Universe

. . . . . . . . . . Where does the Weekly Standard want U.S. troops?

I’m Not There

. . . . . . . . . . What do we want George Bush to say about the White House?

Away From Her

. . . . . . . . . . What can’t Bill Clinton wait to be?

Hitman and Shooter

. . . . . . . . . . What do the Secret Service call Karl Rove and Dick Cheney?

American Gangster

. . . . . . . . . . And President Bush?

Gone Baby Gone

. . . . . . . . . . Describe Eliot Spitzer’s political future.

Planet Terror

. . . . . . . . . . What strategy do George Bush and Osama bin Laden share?

Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem

. . . . . . . . . . Describe the end of Tom Tancredo’s presidential candidacy.

The 11th Hour

. . . . . . . . . . What did Eliot Spitzer get free after every ten hookers?

Enchanted

. . . . . . . . . . What sort of voters is Barak Obama counting on?

Awake

. . . . . . . . . . What sort is he most worried about?

I Know Who Killed Me

. . . . . . . . . . If Obama loses, what will he say about Jeremiah Wright?

I Am Legend

. . . . . . . . . . What’s in McCain’s own mind.

Superbad

. . . . . . . . . . How badly is the media in the tank for Obama?

In a just universe, every auditorium showing Never Back Down would be surrounded by crime scene tape with uniformed police officers warning passersby to “Please step away from the movie, there’s nothing to see here.” Because there isn’t. This isn’t so much a motion picture theatrical release as an Afternoon Special horribly metastasized into something even more clichéd, more superficially moralistic and far, far less watchable. Constant Viewer is frankly shocked they bothered to use expensive film stock instead of easily erasable video tape for this pretend movie.

The characters are all morality-play level stereotypes: the troubled hero, his struggling, divorced mother, the cute girl, vapid but popular because (aside from being cute and vapid, that is) she dates the baddest, constantly smirking and, of course, most wildly popular bad ass at the local high school. For no reason, not that anything else in the movie makes sense, every student but our hero at this school comes from a fabulously wealthy family. If these kids walked past any of the old 90210 cast on the streets, they’d probably slip the poor guy a couple of bucks for, you know, like a charity latte or whatever, dude.

So why are these spoiled rotten, brain dead 20-something ‘kids’ even in a public high school? Or any school other than an acting school, for that matter. Who knows? Their idea of fun, fun, fun is mixed martial arts brawling promoted via YouTube and somehow organized to a level just a tad less cheesy and over the top than the WWF. There are, of course, no police in this world to stop such nonsense and, apparently, only one or two disapproving parents or school officials. Indeed, there are few grown ups of any sort and the few there are are themselves emotionally arrested like our hero’s martial arts teacher, a Caribbean expat with a chip on his own shoulder about dear old Daddy.

Did the producers of this monstrosity actually find that legendary room full of monkeys with typewriters? Certainly nothing in the dialog suggests otherwise. Nor does any of the directing, what little of it there appears to be in this smorgasbord of clichéd if not outright plagiarized set pieces. Even the crew should have demanded billing as Alan Smithee for this cinematic obscenity. Another reviewer posed the rhetorical question, “Haven’t we seen this movie before?” but the answer is hell no, not even the most cringe inducing scene from the most cringe inducing sequel to The Karate Kid or any of the probably hundreds of such stories over the years could manage to induce cringes like Never Back Down. By around twenty minutes into the film, the audience is literally begging for the obligatory final fight scene when our hero prevails – surprise! surprise! – against all odds and kicks the bad ass’s bad ass, the sooner the better so we can all get the hell out of there. Constant Viewer can’t recall the last time he has wasted the better part of a twenty and two hours of his life so thoroughly. At least not when the name M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t attached to the project.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a charmingly quirky and semi-screwball romantic comedy with an oddly bittersweet ending. Set as a period piece in England between the world wars, we find Guinevere Pettigrew (the wonderful Frances McDormand), a frumpy working class spinster with an empty stomach, passing herself off as a social secretary to songstress and would-be starlet Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams), herself a poseur with little more to her name than the dress on her back and two dozen pair of shoes. As Delysia bounces cheerfully among the many men in her life in the course of a single day, Miss Pettigrew’s comparatively vast sense and sensibility manages to rescue her from herself and, in the process, Miss Pettigrew manages to stumble into what looks like a much better prospect than a mere full stomach, too.

The film is a bit slow starting and, truth be told, the pace slackens a bit and almost stalls from time to time. Well, it’s a small movie, after all, and the somewhat erratic directing inadvertently adds to its also sometimes strained sense of style. More significantly, though, the looming threat of World War II adds a melancholy element to the story, especially in its resolution. We are all of us too sophisticated to believe in happily-ever-afters any more even at the conclusions of our romantic comedies, but we leave the theater this time worrying that Miss Pettigrew’s happily-for-a-while might be cruelly cut short once again. Hollywood, CV can assure you, would never leave us feeling so queasy. Which is another way of saying that Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is better than typical Hollywood fare.