D.C. MOVIE GUYS

MOVIE REVIEW: “ANACONDA: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID”

Ah, yes, late August. That time of year when movie critic’s thoughts turn
lightly to. . .homicide. That is, we’d like to kill the presenters of junk
that tend o clog the multiplexes around the end of summer. This is the time
of the summer movie season when the movies that the studios didn’t figure
they’d be able to find an audience for, even if they gave free popcorn, soft drinks and the phone number of the cutest usher/usherette in the house to every ticket buyer under the age of thirty. “Anaconda: The Hunt for The
Blood Orchid” pretty much fits this profile, but, for sheer “so bad it’s funny” laughs, it’s a real guilty pleasure. (more…)

MOVIE REVIEW: “THE VILLAGE”

Screenwriter and director M. Night Shyamalan made an impressive “debut” the
the movie big leagues in 1999 with his suspensful ghost story “The Sixth
Sense.” Skillfully acted by a superb cast led by an understated Bruce
Willis, the movie did an excellent job of pulling the wool over the eyes of
everyone (including your humble reviewer) until its final twist.
Shyamalan’s next film, “Unbreakable”, reunited him with Willis in the story
of an average man who suddenly realizes he’s been blessed-or cursed-with
superhero-like invunerability and must decide how or if he’ll make use of
his gift. Unfortunately, the plot’s use of comic book collecting and
mythology as a backdrop turned off folks expecting a second “Sixth Sense”
and the movie became a box office disappointment.

Shyamalan’s 2002 effort, “Signs”, starred Mel Gison as a former minister
facing a challenge to his faith after the loss of his wife. He and his
remaining family members find their world turned upside down when crop
circles and other symbols start appearing all over the world and turn out to

be the signal for an alien invasion. Though it posessed some intriguing
elements, “Signs” fell apart ln mid-story and delivered a silly,
unsatisfying ending.

So, after on great movie, one misunderstood movie and one very uneven movie,

wherre does Shymalan’s latest scare-fest, “The Village” fall? For me,
somewhere bwtween “Unbreakable” and the second half of “Signs”. In other
words, once you spot the now traditional twist, you’ll likely fall into one
of two groups: those who sit in the theatre saying “Oh, really?” and those
who say “Oh, darn.” (Feel free to fill in your favorite declareative
statement.)

Set in a late 19th Century Pennsylvania village, the movie focuses on a
community that has declared a seemingly unbroken truce with the “creatures”
who live in the deep woods that surround their community. At least a couple

of generations have grown up in this place, knowing and understading the
rules that govern the truce. They include no displaying the bad color of
read and never wandering into the woods. Unfortunately, these rules also
cut the town off from towns just beyond the woods. Though considered evil
and dangerous by the villagers, the towns also contain such advances as
medicine, which can prevent death from simple diseases.

As the movie opens, a small child has died because of a lack of medication.

A brave young villager , Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks the council of
elders for permission to venture into town for medical supplies, but is
refused. Another corageous soul in the village is Ivy (newcomer Bryce
Dallas Howard, the daughter of director Ron Howard.) She finds herself
drawn to the shy Lucius and boldly declares her love for him. That
declaration becomes one in a chain of events that will test Ivy’s love for
Lucius, the truce and the very exsistance of the village.

Though Shyamalan does a good job of establishing a certain mood, his basic
storyline feels contrived and less than original. He’s been rewarded with
several solid performances by such talented old prros as William Hurt, as
the leader of the elder’s council and Sigourney Weaver as Lucius’ school
teacher mom. Howard also delivers a remarkably assured and confident
performance for someone so young in age and experience. If Shyamalan had
given as much care to developing his overall plot as he did to developing
the love story subplot between Phoenix and Howard, the movie would be on par

with “Sixth Sense.”

I won’t play spoiler here and reveal the twist. I’ll simply leave you with
a piece of advice that’s about as old-and much more on target-than this
hollow scare-fest: “You pays your money, you takes your chances.” In this
“Village”, however, the house wins, you lose.

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for violence and scarry special effects.
JOE’S RATING: ONE AND ONE-HALF STARS.

Movie critics see movies in a variety of ways. There are press screenings usually held during business hours in smaller venues with only a few colleagues in attendance. Often critics are informed of “word-of-mouth” screenings held in the evening at regular theatres in which the few critics in the house are surrounded by regular folk who have been invited so as to become water cooler critics with the hope that they will be more dependable endorsers of the movie. Rarely do major releases open as did Alien Vs. Predator with the movie unscreened for reviewers leaving them to either ignore the movie or scrambling to see it over the opening weekend.
I normally do not attach much significance to a movie opening unscreened. After all, the same people who will happily screen dreck like Sleepover despite its lack of any shred of entertainment value are the same ones telling you by their inaction that they do not think much of Alien Vs. Predator. I do not believe them on the good and see no reason to take their word for anything else (I am not from Missouri, but my motto is still “Show Me”). So on the opening weekend, I trekked off to the multiplex with the rest of America’s moviegoing horde to make Rupert Murdoch just a bit richer (though to be honest I got in on a pass and saw the movie at one of the country’s few remaining single screen theatres).
Not surprisingly, the movie is a good deal better than its unscreened status would indicate. Ranking all six Alien and Predator movies would lock in AVP solidly ahead of the repulsive Alien3 and hardly among the summer’s worst movies.
Although the combining of creatures whose individual franchises had become exhausted is almost as old as horror movies themselves (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943] is one of the earlier examples), the seeds of AVP were sown in Predator 2 when Danny Glover gains entrance to the space hunters’ ship and walks past a trophy case which contains an alien head (cue appreciative laugh from the quick of eye). But though both are the corporate property of Fox and News Corp. (which including Bill O’Reilly gives 20th Century Fox the ownership of three uncommunicative horror icons), it has taken nearly 15 years of fanzines, video games, and graphic novels keeping up the drum beat before we are finally left with this movie.
As with the two most recent Star Trek movies, that is an awful lot of effort and concern being paid off with damn little story and entertainment. For those who came in late: The Predators are hunters from outer space who have come to earth in 1987 and 1990 to hunt humans (or at least Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gary Busey). They are aided in their most dangerous games with stealth-type camouflage and an array of bladed weapons. The Aliens are just big, nasty bugs that use humans (or any other living thing) as incubators. A few hundred years from now, the aliens will be discovered on an uninhabited planet by a passing mining ship and will make reappearances on three other occasions. They grow very quickly, bleed acid, and seem to have a particular disaffection for Sigourney Weaver.
Let’s see, I think that covers just about everything. Oh, wait the movie. Later this year, a satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation (cue, first knowing laugh, the Weyland-Yutani Corp. will run the ore ship that discovers the aliens in the future and their founder Charles Bishop Weyland—a leader in robotics—will be the face and namesake for their very popular Bishop line of androids which are well known for their loyalty and ingenuity) will discover an inexplicable heat bloom in Antarctica. An expedition will be hastily assembled to dig under the permafrost and uncover a pyramid. It turns out that the Aliens have already come to earth and the bug queen is just waiting for some suitable hosts to arrive before she can begin the new colony hatching.
The humans show up, the bug eggs start hatching, and the face huggers start flying. Meanwhile, the predators show up for what we are told is a centennial hunt that dates back to prehistoric times. A lot of very resilient species seem to have a great deal of time to waste sitting around waiting. The predators attack the humans, the aliens attack everything, and the predators start attacking the aliens. Characters explain everything before getting capped and because this is an Alien movie first, only a girl (Sanaa Lathan) is left to carry on the fight.
B-level horror director Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with the A-level director named Paul Thomas Anderson who directed Magnolia) is of no help here as the characters race around poorly-lit sets, fight a great deal, and never seem to get much done. Although the predator was never anything more than a villain in an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle (making Arnold positively glib compared to the mute predator), it is sad to see the Aliens degenerate to this after having been so successfully resurrected as a franchise.
While not the worst movie of the summer, Alien Vs. Predator never rises above the most formulaic levels.

Joe’s Review

Max (Jamie Foxx) is a Los Angeles cab driver with big dreams. Even though he makes a good living driving the cleanest cab in LA and knowing how long it will take to get to any location in the city down to the minute, he plans to open a limo service in the city of the stars that will be so grand, passengers will never want to leave the car. A charming wrinkle in his plans develops when he meets an attractive, hard working US Attorney (Jada Pinkett Smith) who’s preparing for a big case. When he picks up an intense, well dressed passenger named Vincent (Tom Cruise), he suddenly finds himself in the midst of a ride for his life. Vincent’s night long game of cat and mouse with Max is the heart of “Collateral,” the new thriller from Michael Mann, the creator of “Miami Vice” and the director of such films as “Thief” and “Heat.”
Vincent’s a professional killer and he’s in Los Angeles for a single night. His job is to wipe out five people tied to a major narcotics gang. He chooses Max to take him from location to location while doing his deadly work. An unplanned mis-step makes Max an unwilling witness to the first hit and Vincent forces him to become a reluctant “partner” in his activities for the night. As they travel about the city, the two get a glimpse into each other’s lives. As Max tries to find a way out, the police and federal agents, thinking they know what’s going on, try to close in before Vincent completes his task.
Mann’s greatest skill as a director has been his ability to create and sustain a certain look and mood in his movies and he does another fine job in “Collateral.” Mann’s Los Angeles at night is a city of shadowy grays, inky blacks and dark purples, illuminated by pools of sometimes harsh white light. As he portrays it, Los Angeles feels lonely and empty at night, a place where people you don’t want to meet plan deals you don’t want to know about. James Newton Howard’s musical score, relying heavily on blues and jazz, underscores the feeling of danger in the air.
Though it gets off to a strong start as it introduces Max, Vincent and Smith’s Annie, screenwriter Stuart Beattie fails to keep up the clever, edgy tone he starts out with. Too often he seems to rely on the movie’s action scenes and the audience’s fascination with watching Cruise play a ruthless killer to get past the holes in the plot, including a laughably involved final showdown between Max, Vincent and the last person on the list.
A second major problem is Cruise’s performance. Though he invests Vincent with a tough and violent veneer, Cruise just can’t seem to bring himself to be totally despised or feared by the audience, so he undercuts Vincent’s violent behavior with an all-too-ready mega-watt, movie star smile and Zen-like asides about the nature of life. Place an Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro in this role and it takes on an extra dimension of danger. You feel as if these actors could so intimidate Foxx’s Max he wouldn’t dream of looking for help while the killer’s out of the cab. It’s hard to believe that kind of menace coming from good ol’ Tom.
Despite being well stocked with strong supporting performers, such as Mark Ruffalo, Peter Berg and Irma P. Hall (another Mann strength), “Collateral” too often veers off the clear path to quality thrillerdom it starts out on and ends up in the boondocks on unfulfilled potential. In other words, this was a contender that looked good in the early rounds, but went down swinging at shadows.

Bill’s Review

Credit the interest of Tom Cruise that a script by Stuart Beattie that has been kicking around for years entitled Collateral has finally made it to the big screen. Maybe Mr. Beattie’s participation with a somewhat well-known movie called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl helped, but not as much as Tom Cruise giving it a thumbs up. Credit the direction of Michael Mann and the performances by Cruise and Jamie Foxx for taking a simple script and making the movie as good as it is. The story is fairly typical of the “high concept” school of screenwriting (a story that can be summed up in a single sentence—preferably in a pitch meeting to movie executives).
One of the old definitions of collateral was something held in trust to guarantee compliance. Thanks to the Newspeak bureau at our Department of Defense, modern listeners most often hear the word collateral linked to the word damage to refer to the people we killed by mistake while we were busy killing the people that we really wanted dead. Making liberal use of both definitions, this Collateral is a deftly enjoyable genre picture that goes beyond its ordinary script and is even able to overcome an attack of the “stupids” in the final reel.
For Los Angeles cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx), the night has started off promisingly by helping out a pretty lawyer (Jada Pinkett Smith) with his superior knowledge of L.A. geography and traffic patterns. And he barely has time to log in her ride when attractive, personable, and well-dressed Vince (Cruise) climbs aboard with an offer to keep him busy throughout his shift with several stops and a bonus for a swift completion of his appointed rounds (admittedly, wrong public service, but I am unaware of the cabby’s code). Unfortunately, while waiting for Vince outside an apartment building, a potential fare drops in smashing his neck and Max’s windshield. Worse, it turns out Vince knows the guy and insists that they give the new friend a ride, albeit in the trunk.
Well Max may be only one of the few native-born, English-speaking cab drivers in Los Angeles county, but he thinks something just might be wrong and Vince informs him that while their night filled with stops may entail Vince killing somebody at each destination, at least he was serious about the bonus. Now Max has no choice, but to play accessory with a hack license or else Vince is going to see just how much room there is in the trunk. Meanwhile, coppers Mark Ruffalo and Peter Berg are trying to see the pattern in the crime spree and wondering why each crime scene is connected with a federal agent (Bruce McGill).
Although Mr. Mann has done the cops and robbers stuff much better in Heat, Thief, and Manhunter, he gets more mileage out of less script by concentrating on turning the movie into an anti-buddy picture. The scenes between Foxx and Cruise are the movie’s finest asset and as he proved in Magnolia, Mr. Cruise shows himself a better actor as a sociopath than he has ever been allowed while acting the hero—maybe it is the infectious grin. Foxx’s abilities are no surprise to anyone who saw him in supporting roles in Any Given Sunday or Ali (also for Mann).
Michael Mann has produced a better movie in just about any feature he has ever done, but that is more a credit to the uniformly superb nature of his filmography than the deficiencies of Collateral. Early on, the camerawork is a bit claustrophobic with too many tight-in shots of faces, but once things get rolling Mann’s framing opens up a bit as well. That the Mann touch manages to enhance this story to such a degree is more a compliment than many of his other films. Getting a good movie out of a novel by Thomas Harris or the true stories of Muhammad Ali or the tobacco lobby and 60 Minutes is child’s play compared to keeping Collateral going for two hours. The script still betrays its New York City original setting that makes for an especially weak subway ride final reel confrontation. Hey guys, you are in Los Angeles and your hero is a cab driver—take to the road.
Still even with its tarnish, one wishes that every summer entertainment were as fully realized and well made as Collateral–or even every Tom Cruise vehicle.