10-Year-Old Movies

The Sweetest Thing (by Maris Kreizman)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:18:00 -0500

Today’s 10YOM is guest-written by Maris Kreizman. She’s a writer and creator of the brilliant Slaughterhouse 90210, which you should read as soon as you finish this.

Year 2002 Trademarks:

Discussion of how fat-free chips cause anal leakage
Charlie’s Angels hair
Chokers

“Your penis packs a wallop, your penis brings a load. And when it makes a delivery, it needs its own zip code.” Forgive me if the first time I saw The Sweetest Thing I didn’t recognize it to be a sly subversion of male fantasies, a ballsy feminist statement in an age of raunch. Maybe that’s because The Sweetest Thing is a terrible movie. It really is. It is sloppy and random and rarely witty. Its brand of humor is the broadest of broad, with sight gags galore and almost no plot to speak of. There are puke jokes and fake tit jokes and cum stain jokes and post-Indian food shitting jokes, and there is a crotchety old grandpa wearing a “Who farted?” T shirt. And yet.

There was something perversely charming about the movie when I saw it in 2002, probably because it pulled off a nice little bait and switch: starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair, on the surface level The Sweetest Thing seemed like it would be just another generic chick flick about a bunch of single gals looking for love. But then you start watching and something goes down that’s so utterly absurd, so egregiously disgusting, that you realize there’s little that’s formulaic about it. Four years after Cameron Diaz’s breakout title role as a non-threatening dream girl surrounded by a bunch of wacky, hormonally-charged men, here she is in a movie that’s a hundred times grosser than There’s Something About Mary. And this time around she and her lady friends are the ones who get to be nasty. Picture Mary rhapsodizing on the odor of her poonani, or fantasizing about eating an enormous bowl of calorie-free ice cream while Mr. Right goes down on her, and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about. The Farrelly brothers’ dream girl has dreams of her own, after all.

Ostensibly, The Sweetest Thing is about what happens when a smoking hot party girl named Christina (Diaz, duh) who’s left a trail of broken hearts in her wake, meets-cute the man of her dreams (Thomas Jane, in a role almost entirely devoid of personality) for a few minutes in a nightclub and then spends the rest of the movie trying to track him down. More importantly, it’s the story of three women whose friendship is more passionate and multi-layered than any feebly constructed romantic relationship (it’s apparently based on screenwriter Nancy Pimental’s friendship with Kate Walsh of Grey’s Anatomy fame). These women have their own language (the adjective “bejiggedy” means “bent out of shape”), their own songs (more on that in a sec), and scores of inside jokes and banter—most of which is absolutely filthy, and gleefully so. Say what you will about the quality of the conversation, these women—the characters and the actresses—are clearly having fun.

If you’ve only seen the edited version of the movie on TBS or TNT on some hungover Sunday, please, do yourself a favor: find a copy of the unrated version, because it features a full-fledged production number that startled the shit out of me a decade ago. It starts out at a Chinese restaurant, where Christina and her BFF Courtney (Christina Applegate, in a role that would make Kelly Bundy blush), are quizzing Jane (Selma Blair, doing that prudish thing she does so well) about her new boyfriend. They remind Jane that a new lover must be flattered, and the best way to, uh, stroke a male ego is to hyperbolize about one particular body part. Cue “The Penis Song,” (co-written by the three lead actresses) which begins with the ladies moaning, “You’re too big to fit in here”, as they motion to various orifices. Then a beat gets dropped, a synthesizer appears, and chop sticks become drum sticks as the entire restaurant partakes in a penis-themed song-and-dance number that involves a conga line, the Electric Slide, and some rapping. Basically, it’s like the most inappropriate bar mitzvah reception ever. And this WTF group number is echoed later on, when Jane gets her tonsil stuck on said boyfriend’s dick piercing, and Christina and Courtney come to her rescue. They decide that singing is the only way to relax Jane’s throat enough to free her, so, obvs, they choose to perform “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing,” AKA “That Aerosmith song from Armageddon” and an entire roomful of people—including the cops, some EMTs and a few leather daddies—happily join in. This is what true friends do.

I mention these super random scenes because, ten years later, they make that shitting-in-a-sink scene from Bridesmaids almost look tame. My fingers are crossed that Bridesmaids will get some Oscar love, and I’m counting the days until Bachelorette comes out. I love all the think pieces about female-oriented comedies these films have generated, and lord knows I’m looking forward to a time when the idea that “women can be funny/gross” isn’t a revelation. From this vantage point, it’s hard not to see The Sweetest Thing as a part of this spectrum: a film that may not be particularly well-written, or acted (Diaz appears to emote more with a wiggle of her tiny tush than with her face), but is still really enjoyable and maybe even progressive. Here’s hoping that more nuanced, thoughtful films—that happen to be hysterical—are directed, produced, written and acted by women in years to come. Till then, well, we’ll always have this.

The Most Mediocre Movies of 2011

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:00:06 -0500

Around this time there are a lot of posts listing the year’s best and worst movies, but none honoring those films that land squarely in the middle. I thought it’d be fun to list some of the most mediocre films of 2011. These are the movies you’d be cool with if they showed one during your flight to Des Moines, but will otherwise never think of again. They’re not 10 years old, but honoring random movies destined for obscurity is one of the missions of this blog.

The Way Back

Peter Weir used to make strange choices that you had to respect, even if you disagreed with them: in “Witness” he made the Amish cool, in “The Mosquito Coast” he had Harrison Ford act like Dennis Hopper. Most controversially he put Ed Harris in a Kangol hat in “The Truman Show.” But since 2003’s swashbuckler “Master and Commander,” Weir has nuzzled into the comfortable genre of historical dramas, Hollywood’s most fertile genre for harvesting a mediocre movie (we’ll get to “The Conspirator” in a second). “The Way Back” is about a bunch of tough Soviet POWs who escape the gulag and trek 4,000 miles to freedom. Inspiring? Sure. But you’re still just watching Colin Farrell walk south for over 2 hours.

Most mediocre part: The ambiguous poster line, “Inspired by true events.”

The Conspirator

Move over, “Glory,” there’s a new obligatory movie for teachers to show when they’re hung over! “The Conspirator” plays like the best reenactments in a History Channel special you’ve ever seen. It’s a dramatization of the hysteria that gripped America following the Lincoln assassination, and the politically outspoken director Robert Redford was clearly trying to say stuff about our post-9/11 handling of detainees, so it’s a testament to the film’s mediocrity that it’s most incendiary feature remains the casting of Justin Long in a period drama.

Most mediocre part: Entire movie is in sepia tone

Larry Crowne

“Larry Crowne” is the “Citizen Kane” of mediocre movies. I’d save it for last if that wasn’t self-defeating. No, when it comes to a list honoring mediocrity, here in the middle is the prize spot. “Larry Crowne” is as pleasant as Julia Roberts’s audience-approved smile, as edgeless as Tom Hanks’s baby fat, and as safe as the mopeds the characters in the movie drive, instead of actual motorcycles. Insurance salesmen who wear Dockers and like Frank Caliendo would kill to reach the mildness Hanks achieves by simply throwing on a leather jacket in this picture.

Most mediocre part: Did you not hear me mention Hanks’s leather jacket?

The Lincoln Lawyer

“The Lincoln Lawyer” was the mediocre film I was most excited about this year. It was going to be a return-to-form for Matthew McConaughey. No more intentional self-parody, like “Tropic Thunder.” Or unintentional, like “Surfer, Dude.” This square-jawed whodunit was going to remove the air quotes from McConaughey and show us what the man was capable of when you made the dude wear a shirt. But the film reaches neither the intensity of “A Time To Kill” nor the mellow buzz of his current bongo-playing persona. I now realize I was wrong to demand a civilized McConaughey. Just keep livin’, hombre. Just keep livin’.

Most mediocre part: Based on a novel by Michael “Your Aunt’s Beach Reading” Connelly

Water for Elephants

Circus movies are like the actual circus: nice things that haven’t changed their basic structure in a century. Hollywood is convinced the majesty of the big top is timeless (or some shit). In reality, the last good circus movie (“The Circus”) was produced during the Coolidge administration. There’s something underneath the ragtime charm of a circus that seems awkwardly archaic. I can’t shake the feeling that carnival life is depressing and involves the exploitation of animals, the disabled, and obese women with beards. Maybe that’s why the most intriguing part of “Water for Elephants” is Christoph Waltz as a sociopathic circus owner who’s like Hans Landa for animals.

Most mediocre part: The fucking title.

Honorable mentions: One Day, The Company Men, The Adjustment Bureau

Big Trouble

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:47:00 -0400

Year 2001 Trademarks:

Postponed due to cataclysmic event that has come to define the 21st century
Dennis Farina

Ten years ago 19 angry men gave America its worst Tuesday ever, even by Tuesday standards. Since countless talented writers have shared their personal biographies of the events of 9/11, most of whom have practice writing about topics more important than the influence of Alicia Silverstone, I will keep my own memories of that Tuesday brief. But you can’t talk about Big Trouble without talking about the rise of global terror, which is something you really can’t say about many Tim Allen films.

What sticks out in my brain are the little changes. The images of the collapsing towers and what such images meant were too mind-bogglingly huge for a high schooler to instantly comprehend. What brought the enormity of the disaster into relief for me, living just north of New York City, were the small disruptions to daily routine, and back then this daily routine consisted entirely of channel surfing and going to the movies.

Before 9/11, breaking news only disrupted the networks, not cable. No matter what was happening in the world, I knew I could always pick up the remote and escape to the higher altitudes of basic cable. But on 9/11, even the most nihilistic channels halted their regular programming and turned their airtime to affiliate coverage of the horror in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. And since these channels were a (too big) part of my life, the unprecedented grounding of all US flights shook me less than MTV’s sudden disappearance. The party was over, specifically the MTV Beach House: Summer in the Keys party.

I don’t mean to trivialize the attacks. On the contrary, the disruption of film and TV are only important as eerie aftershocks of the true catastrophe that caused them, like signs of struggle at a crime scene or a really nasty hangover. It’s a small part of a big day, a footnote. But even footnotes serve a purpose, just ask an English professor.

Big Trouble is a goofball crime film starring Tim Allen, Rene Russo, Heavy D and every That Guy in Hollywood, and it’s al Queda’s least-important victim. The movie was scheduled to come out on September 21, 2001, which would have made it the second major motion picture released following the terrorist attacks. (The first, in case you were interested, was The Glass House, which came out on schedule on 9/14). Then planes were hijacked and Big Trouble’s plane hijacking finale became the worst-timed ending since Twin Peaks. Disney postponed the film’s release, and somewhere in Tora Bora a fundamentalist who really didn’t like Home Improvement laughed at a job well done.

When it finally came out in April 2002, Big Trouble was a box office disappointment and received mixed reviews. I found Big Trouble charming,but was not surprised by its lukewarm reception. The movie, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, was a noble attempt to revive the ensemble farce, a long-dormant type of comedy that produced a string of successful, silly films in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World created the formula in ‘63, filling a dozen wacky roles with movie stars and witty To Tell The Truth panelists, and placing them in lots of scenes involving hot air balloons. Mad World was a hit and remains one of the most successful films of all time, despite premiering the week of the the Kennedy assassination.

Other ensemble farces followed, including Cannonball Run, Spielberg’s 1941, Caddyshack and Clue. In the ’90s they began a hibernation, taken over by heartfelt domestic comedies like Father of the Bride or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, out-and-out parody like Hot Shots! Christopher Guest kind-of filled the void with his wide troupe of mockumentarians, but his movies were always more witty than outrageous. The ensemble farce had become corny and immature, living on only in the hearts of The Simpsons writers, who ended a season-5 episode with a screwball chase scene honoring the sub-genre. In 2001, after There’s Something About Mary proved there was a shit-ton of money to be made in lowbrow laughs, two ensemble farces were produced: Rat Race, which came out in 2001, and Big Trouble, which very much did not.

It’s really only the climax of Big Trouble, in which Tom Sizemore’s character sneaks a gun and a nuke through a comatose airport security checkpoint, that got the movie shelved for a year. When I watched this scene, it all honestly seemed pretty harmless to me. A little edgy, perhaps, but acceptable given a year of waiting, and not without purpose. Plus the hijacker in Big Trouble is an idiotic crook whose motive is money, not a homicidal fundamentalist who’s motive is an imaginary brothel in the sky, and the good guys win in the end with zero casualties. So I was surprised to read fresh hostility from critics reviewing the movie. Even Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times was perturbed by the airport scene:

Reviewers found it at best misguided satire, at worst deliberately offensive. I think Big Trouble’s pithy attitude toward airline danger took on a new meaning after its delay, a meaning that was defiant and, in a way, reassuring. Airports in the post-9/11 world are fascinating places: at once both terrifying and mind-numbingly dull. Depending on your state-of-mind, Delta is either your last stop before certain doom or just a boring formality. Big Trouble took these two interpretations and threw them together in a scene that’s as nerve-wracking as it is unabashedly silly. As if to highlight his message, Sonnenfeld cast as the hijacker’s hostage Zooey Deschanel, the reigning queen of bored exasperation, the ultimate airline passenger.

Once America realized the world was not going to end, we remembered there were still 99-dollar trips to Orlando to buy and weddings to dutifully attend, and only one way to get there fast and cheap. So we threw our hands up and packed our bags. Airports had always been unpleasant places, if global terror was going to make it a bit more unpleasant, so be it. Today, the guy with the cell phone clip scarfing down a Cinnabon as he boards a flight to Santa Fe is an American warrior, defying jihadists with a quiet bravery. I salute you, sir.

A Knight's Tale (by Will Hines)

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Today’s review is guest-written by actor/comedian/2001 film aficionado Will Hines.

I didn’t expect A Knight’s Tale, the 2001 this-has-to-be-for-teenage-girls-only-right? movie starring Heath Ledger and Paul Bettany, to be funny. But it was. I saw it on a plane in December of 2001, and I expected it to be lots of slow-motion shots of Heath Ledger doing dreamy things like being in love and maybe punching while sweating. I expected the story to be predictable and all the characters to speak in obvious first-thought dialogue (“That knight’s plan is so crazy it.. just.. might.. work”). I expected it to be like a Disney Channel movie but with like two swears.

But A Knight’s Tale is much closer to a simpler, less-pretentious Shakespeare in Love than She’s All That. Although the story is predictable (you know The Knight? He wins), the characters are smarter and more cynical than you’d expect, the jokes are great, the sad moments are sad, and overall there is an impressive sense of fun. I kept wanting to shake strangers on the plane: are you watching this? This is good!

The story: Heath Ledger is a squire named William Thatcher who serves a knight who dies during a joust. Impersonating his master, Ledger wins the match and then tries to keep fooling everyone that he is the late knight. He befriends Geoffery Chaucer (Paul Bettany), who becomes his hype man. And he romances Shannyn Sossamon (presumably because they are the two best looking humans in the movie).

What stands out the most of this movie is its willful use of anachronisms: the crowd chants “He Will Rock You!” a la Queen when Thatcher takes the field. At a dance, the 14th century band is somehow playing “Golden Years” by David Bowie. Thatcher’s blacksmith friend forges new armor, and arbitrarily puts a Nike swoosh across the chest plate. When Chaucher introduces our hero at matches, he does so with the same cadence as the “Are you ready to rumble?” dude, which was not such a dated reference when this movie came out.

Too gimmicky? The writer/director Brian Helgeland noted in an interview around this time that MOST medieval movies have anachronisms — just less noticeable ones. You’ll see King Arthur dancing to Mozart, or Robin Hood bathing himself more than once a year or whatever. So he picked ones that made his movie more fun. Hey, I’m on board Helgeland! David Bowie IS more fun than Mozart!

The second theme of the movie is the use of Chaucer. The title of the film is the title of the very first Canterbury Tale, and there are a fair number of Canterbury Tale in-jokes throughout. You see Chaucher become irritated by someone, only to confirm their occupation “What are you, a Summoner? I’ll remember that” — referring to what I assume is “A Summoner’s Tale. “

Like Shakespeare In Love (I swear that I have also seen movies aimed at men), A Knight’s Tale makes great use of showing highbrow characters in lowbrow situations. Chaucher is a compulsive liar and gambler (he instantly gambles away all of his money and clothes whenever he is left alone). The princes and noblemen are conversational and naturalistic.

And that Heath Ledger guy? Good actor! He carries the film through several dramatic turns. I predict this guy makes a good movie or two.

I tried raving about this film to friends after my vacation, and was met with the same suspicious glances askance when I talk too much about The Smiths or Kate Bush. But trust me: this is a short, funny smart movie.

Vertical Limit

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:33:00 -0500

Editors note: I started writing this post on New Years’ Eve 2010. This will be the last entry for the year 2000. Keep checking for the next post, in which we’ll be boldly going into the world of 2001 cinema…

Year 2000 Trademarks:

Features Chris O’Donnell’s last theatrical starring role to date
Released on Superbit DVD
Mountain Dew-esque extreme view of snow

I was born on the day after Christmas in 1984. I have no grudge about this. True, it meant a traditional birthday party was a non-option. December 26, after all, is the National day of recovering from the copious ham and alcohol consumption of the previous night. Moreover, mom and dad needed to decompress from the previous month of shopping, Mariah Carey music, visiting relatives and TNT’s godforsaken 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon, a programming gimmick that has single-handedly sucked every bit of joy from an otherwise classic film, as though Ted Turner needed to gobble up America’s yuletide memories to power his hyperbaric energy chamber, located in Atlanta eight stories below the World of Coca-Cola. But birthday parties at that point in my life terrified me anyway. Not the getting older part, of course (I was still counting the days until I turned 16 and the local comic shop would sell me a laser pointer). No, what scared me was giving my schoolmates, who even as pre-teens were well versed in repulsive yo’ momma jokes, eyewitness to my family. I was protective of my little after-school bubble of solace. Besides, Jesus had it worse than me. His birthday is actually on Christmas.

Instead of a party, my childhood birthday tradition went as follows: every year around 6pm my brothers and I would pile into the capped flatbet of our dad’s Toyota pickup truck and head to dinner at the Olive Garden, followed by a movie at the Galleria, in whose parking lot the Italian chain eatery was located. The food was salty and reliable and delicious (really, is there a better vegetable minestrone for less than 5 dollars?). But the quality of the movie portion? A lot more hit-or-miss. I wish I could say teenage Patrick had the refined cinematic sensibilities of a snob thrice his age. But the only people I was trying to impress were my overcaffinated, House of Pain-obsessed siblings. Thus the selections I made today look like the overzealous mistakes of a pre-teen drunk on Alfredo and complimentary bread that they were. Instead of Toy Story, for example, I asked my dad, if he’d please, to procure us five tickets to the :8:00 presentation of Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Pending a substantial critical re-appraisal of both films, I will admit this was the wrong choice.

How, you ask, is this lengthy and self-indulgent biography connected to with 2000’s Vertical Limit? The man-versus-mountain adventure had the dubious honor of being my 16th birthday selection. Was this tragically forettable movie another in my long line of bad birthday choices, or was I simply the most forward-thinking pre-teen in the Hudson Valley, seeing a potentical future classic between the explosions and icy fistfights? I’m not claiming there was any way in hell I would’ve chosen All the Pretty Horses or one of the other Oscar contenders on the marquee that day. But Dude, Where’s My Car? was right there for the watching.

Vertical Limit, it turns out, is not a bad movie – it just really wants to be. But mountain climbing, like boxing, is one of those activities that seem impervious to boring films. When they’re not bad they’re pretty good, and when they’re terrible they’re not bad. And when they’re great they lead to five sequels and Dolph Lundgren. Ask most people what they remember about Mission: Impossible II and they won’t talk about Ethan’s love triangle or the theft of Chimera. They’ll recall T.C.’s sick rock-climbing from the opening credits. This scene has absolutely nothing to do with the movie except giving Cruise a chance to show his shoulder muscles, and yet it’s that movie’s signature shot. Cliffhanger is a movie so full of bad choices its embodiment of evil is portrayed by the cherubic John Lithgow. It’s directed by Renny Harlin, who I’m certain would be cultural shorthand for big-budget hack if Michael Bay were to retire. But it’s an action classic thanks to a handful of gorgeous, vertigo scenes and the unbearable tension of fraying cords and bending carabiners.

Vertical Limit’s opening borrows heavily from both Cliffhanger’s and M:I-2’s, with the rock-climbing Garret siblings Peter and Annie cragging up a gorgeous desert formation, led by their expert father. A few equipment failures later and Peter is forced to tearfully cut his father loose in order to save his sister’s life. Petter and Annie dangling over vomit-inducing heights by a literal thread is undeniably tense, which is a relief, because you’re unlikely to go three minutes in Vertical Limit with some variation of this setup. Peter and Annie are played by Chris O’Donnel and Robin Tunney, which makes you feel like you’re watching a bizzare Reality Bites or Empire Records sequel in which mountain climbing has replaced documentary filmmaking as the hippest job for 20-somethings.

Cut to 10 years later: Annie, a renowned climber, is recruited for a risky expedition up K2 in the Himalayas, commissioned by the arrogant airline entrepreneur Eliot Vaughn. Vaughn is played with brilliant assholeishness by Bill Paxton. It is the kind of smarmy shithead type that Paxton does so well, but far too rarely. His Texas charm always lands him folksy everyman roles, but in scumbag mode that same charm is used against itself to magnificent effect. Paxton nearly stole the show from Arnold Schwarzenegger with his 10-minute cameo as a scumbag used car salesman in True Lies.

When the leader of Vaughn’s party (The X-Files’sNicholas Lea) demands they turn back before an approaching storm rolls in, Paxton munches on an energy bar and flashes a shit-eating grin. “What did you think,” he says, pointing to the summit, “she’d just lift up her skirt and pull her panties down for us?” Paxton, with his high-tech equipment and inability to feel what the mountain is saying is to Chris O’Donnell what Cary Elwes was to Paxton in Twister. Which is to say it’s best part.

As we all know, a lack of respect for Mother Earth is to a natural disaster movie what sex is to a slasher film. Mr. Vaughn’s huburis finds the climbers in the middle of an avalanche and stuck shivering at the bottom of a ravine. It’s up to Chris O’Donnell to save his sister from chilly doom. He assembles a rag-tag crew including a supermodel doctor, two alcoholic Brits, and an insultingly calm Pakistani. Leading the pack is a GRIZZLED-AS-SHIT Scott Glen. Glenn does admirably well in the role of an aging climber who spends his days searching the icy mountains for his lost wife. When he actually finds his wifesicle in the mountains, in fact, it’s only kind of hilarious:

What is Vertical Limit missing at this point? Not nitroglycerine. But that didn’t stop the filmmakers from adding it. Ascending the most dangerous terrain on planet Earth wasn’t EXTREME enough for this picture – oh hell no. O’Donnell and his team strap canisters of explosives onto their backs, turning each climber into a walking future action sequence. Compared to the authentic threat of the mountain, the nitro stuff feels like somebody snuck it in from a different movie when no one was paying attention. A worse movie. The only redeemable part of the nitro is that it leads to the film’s accidental funniest scene, in which a someone’s shoe explodes.

This leaves us with the most era-specific part of Vertical Limit : Chris O’Donnell. Vertical Limit marked O’Donnell’s last starring role in a feature film. He’s since gone on to a cozy role on CBS’s NCIS: Los Angeles, which according to most recent Nielsen numbers is watched by, roughly, all. But once upon a time he was 1996’s answer to Tobey Maguire. What happened? The vicissitudes of a fickle career in Hollywood are far to complex to boil down to a single word. But I will venture to boil it down to three: Batman & Robin (two words if you don’t include the ampersand).

I often hear George Clooney on Jay Leno or some other late night sofa make a self-deprecating comment about his involvement with 1997’s disastrous Batman and Robin, and while I find it refreshing he can laugh at himself now that a decade’s worth of brainy political thrillers and an Academy Award separates him from his latex-clad days, I wonder if his eye-rolling is not inadvertently flipping the bird to his co-stars Mr. O’Donnell (Robin) and Alicia Silverstone (Batgirl). Let’s face it, those two are truly bearing the albatross of the film. When Clooney encounters drunk fans, there are countless cultural touchstones he’s involved in besides the Caped Crusader. They’re just as likely to ask about ER. But if I ever stumble out of Planet Hollywood drunk on Demolition Man-themed margaritas and bump into Mr. O’Donnell, his stint as the Boy Wonder would be the first stupid thing to roll out of my mouth.

Mr. Shumacher’s movie didn’t just rob us of $8.50, but by hobbling two talented young stars in the formative part of their careers, may have altered the course of Hollywood AS WE KNOW IT. Kind of a reach, I know, but Silverstone’s and O’Donnell’s careers follow eerily similar trajectories: a breakout role in 1993 as a high school student (Clueless, Scent of a Woman), leading to a series of quirky romantic comedies (Excess Baggage, The Bachelor, Mad Love, Blast From the Past, et al.), only to be fatally sidetracked by the gaudy Carmela Soprano necklace that was Batman & Robin and enter an era of quiet — if admirable — supporting roles. All we can do now is wait for the current crop of young filmmakers who grew up on Clueless to write interesting roles for the two and spark Tarantino-esque career revivals.

Perhaps I knew, even at the ripe age of 16, that Vertical Limit would be my last chance to see Mr. O’Donnell at the helm of a blockbuster. And so, in solidarity, I chose that movie as my birthday present instead of my other option that 2000 weekend: Batman in the critically-acclaimed O Brother, Where Art Thou? Or maybe I just wanted to see Bill Paxton playing an asshole and Scott Glenn diving away from nitro explosions. Either way, it was the right choice.

Dungeons & Dragons

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:59:34 -0500

Year 2000 Trademarks:

Early Marlon Wayans attempt to leave Wayans Brothers empire (see: Senseless)
Predicts the great Lord of the Rings fantasy boom of a year later
Thora Birch

In this blog’s last entry, I pondered weather the dated computer-generated monster effects in Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man – and bad CG in general – could possibly age as well as practical, KNB-style puppetry and makeup. In retrospect, I should’ve saved that question for 2000’s Dungeons & Dragons, the big screen adaptation of the legendary role-playing game that popularized the 12-sided die and coined “immersive” as the go-to term for trying to make fantasy sound smart. Dungeons & Dragons features armies of dragons (though no dungeons?), each one rendered in the absolute best computer generated effects a $30 million fantasy film in 2000 could afford – which today looks roughly as good as Sci-Fi Originals’ Boa Vs. Python, made four years later for a tenth of the budget.

Dungeons & Dragons tarnished the perfect record for movies based on board games that began with 1985’s Clue and ended with 1985’s Clue — the only other board game film made (unless Sneakers is based on Scrabble). Unlike Clue, which followed the Parker Brothers’ game so closely it even had random endings, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t really interested in its source material. Aside from a two-second, appease-the-fans appearance of a beholder, the movie uses Gary Gygax’s creation only for the namesake, a hook on which to hang a worse-looking Willow:

In the kingdom of Izmir, people are divided into two social classes: the lowly peasants, and the aristocratic mages (another D&D reference, though a dated one) whose ability to wield magic keeps them in power. (Making all magicians greedy instead of wise was a novel touch.) The fair Empress Salvina (Thora Birch) dreams of changing this unjust caste system — a dream she professes in a series of senatorial addresses to a room full of grumpy politicians. There’s a strong similarity in these addresses to Amidala’s trade disputes in The Phantom Menace. If you weren’t already convinced that decade-old films are relics from the past, let this open your eyes: they were taking their cues from Episode I.

Standing in Salvina’s way is the evil mage Profian (Jeremy Irons), who seeks a magical rod that will allow him to control red dragons — the most dragony of the dragons — and help him stage a coup d’état, ousting Salvina and keeping mages on top of the social pyramid. Irons plays Profian with a nobody’s-seeing-this-anyway intensity that makes him one of the crown jewels of the movie — not exactly a Herculean task, but admirable nonetheless. Roughly 90 percent of his screen time is spent shouting, spinning, gripping his rod (heh heh) and gesticulating at imaginary dragons:

Summoned to keep the Rod from Profian’s hands are two cunning thieves: Ridley (Justin Whalin) and his anachronistic-jargon-shouting sidekick, Snails (Marlon Wayans). Whalin, Izmir’s answer to Han Solo, is probably best known for playing Jimmy Olson on ABC’s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, though former USA viewers will always remember him as grown-up Andy in Child’s Play 3, which the network was legally required to play at least three times a week. D&D probably remains Whalin’s biggest role, and one can only imagine the high hopes New Line Cinema had for the handome young star, whose floppy bangs made him the poor man’s River Phoenix, or the poorer man’s Jonathan Brandis, or the rich man’s Corey Feldman.

In a choice that represents either brilliant post-modern storytelling or lazy writing, the movie’s standard ”call to arms” scene — it’s Council of Elrond or “Help Me Obi Wan Kenobi…” if you will — in which our hero (and we) learn exactly what the hell is going on, takes place entirely off camera. Ridley is sucked into a magic map (as will happen) and reappears several minutes later with full knowledge of his quest. It’s like the narrative trickery used in Mission: Impossible 3, which skips its climactic heist scene. There’s something admirable about admitting we’ve seen your plot so many times before we need not bother with the specifics: Hero seeks rod.

But deconstructing our very perception of linear storytelling as we know it isn’t the only brilliant part of the Dungeons & Dragons movie –- there’s also a maze! Ridley’s quest leads him to the Antieus Thieves’ Guild maze, a booby-trapped labyrinth that’s claimed the lives of many an Izmir thief — MANY an Izmir theif. Sounds corny, but I cannot overstate the primordial fun of watching someone navigate a maze. I had more-or-less written D&D off as a unmitigated disaster and was prepared to attack it in print as ruthlessly as though I were wearing a +3 constitution belt. But when Ridley began dodging bladed pendulums I grew enchanted. If young filmmakers take nothing else away from the Dungeons & Dragons movie (and they won’t), take away this: put a maze in your movie. It’s the attention-retaining equivalent of that insanely hot pool scene in the otherwise-boring Species. Or that insanely hot pool scene in the otherwise boring Color of Night. Mazes are like sex in a swimming pool.

The maze is the most “fun” aspect of the D&D movie by leagues — the only other competition is the it’s incredible score, which is more epic than any Marlon Wayans film should be. The Antius maze is so fun, in fact, that it was adapted by Wizards of the Coast into a playable Dungeons & Dragons RPG Adventure as a tie-in for the movie. (That’s right, not a movie. But REAL.)

Incidentally, during this trip to the WotC website to search for the tie-in, I stumbled upon the company’s official page devoted to the then-“new” D&D movie. Frozen in time since 2000, the page has a now-tragic enthusiasm for a film that was doomed to Blockbuster 3-for-$10 shelves. It was like meeting one of those Japanese soldiers deserted on a South Pacific island who think World War II is still being fought.

Hollow Man

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:13:00 -0400

Was Paul Verhoeven the most underrated director of the 1990s, or the most overrated?

This was what went through my head as I watched a see-through Kevin Bacon twist a supermodel’s titties with his invisible fingers in Verhoeven’s 2000 sci-fi thriller, Hollow Man. The movie is the last film Verhoeven directed in America, capping off a strange, hilarious, outrageous decade-long stay in Hollywood. In just over 10 years, Verhoeven made a series of perverse sci-fi gorefests and softcore erotic thrillers that bookended the 1990s in a clasp of bare chests and mutilated corpses including RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers: all films of almost poronographic excess.

Hollow Man is the underwhelming swan song to Verhoeven’s freewheelin’ ’90s. It’s his worst movie, but it’s also his least insane. This makes Verhoeven unique among filmmakers. Often directors do their worst stuff when they venture off the rails (Heaven’s Gate, Southland Tales). Not Verhoeven. He’s so comfortable off the rails I’m not even sure you can call him a train. He’s more like some kind of Dutch, steam-powered off-road transit system. Like the giant spider in Wild Wild West, which is not a Verhoeven movie, though it’s crazy enough to be one.

Your average Verhoeven character might be covered in toxic waste and splattered into a watery mess. He might be stabbed in the crotch by Martian midget prostitutes or have his brains sucked out by trailer-sized insects. She might have champagne pored over her bare chest by Kyle MacLachlan or have all three of her titties felt up by a future California Govenor. Verhoeven is the reason the phrase “hard R” was invented. He never had a bad guy punched when a metal rod could be shoved through his neck. His bad guys seem to call women “bitch” for no reason. My brother and I watched Total Recall a dozen times growing up, almost exclusively on TNT and TBS. When I finally saw the unedited version in college I was shocked at all the wonderful touches of carnage I’d been missing, like the way Quaid (Schwarzenegger) dislodges his backstabbing friends neck and the hollow popping noise that accompanies it.

And yet, there was always just enough craftsmanship present beneath the tacky paint jobs of Verhoeven vehicles to indicate they might be worth keeping in the driveway. Critics and fans bestowed upon his giant bugs, robotic law enforcers and horny sociopaths a redeeming social importance normally witheld from genre fair until a few decades pass. Invasion of the Body Snatchers had to wait half a century before film snobs took notice of its Red Scare themes, but Verhoeven’s films seemed to get revisionist critiques before the ushers had finished sweeping the Goobers from the theater floor. Mostly RoboCop, which eventually got a Criterion DVD release, but also Basic Instinct (which screened at Cannes) and the fascist undertones of Starship Troopers. Even Showgirls became a bonafide cult classic with its own boxed-set DVD.

Against all odds, then, Mr. Verhoeven wound up making just one bad movie in America: Hollow Man. Sebastian Caine (Bacon) is a brilliant, arrogant biologist who defies his government backers and uses himself as a test subject for a serum that turns organisms invisible — or, to use the terminology of the film’s pseudo-science, shifts them “out of quantum sync with the visible universe.” Reluctantly assiting Caine is a team of lab technicians and PhD’s whose importance in the project is directly proportional to their sexiness: Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Shue are his right and left hand men, whereas curly-haired Joey Slotnick spends the movie tucked neatly far behind a bank of computer monitors. He might have just stayed put after Twister.

The centerpiece of Hollow Man is an extended scene where Caine, straped to a hospital bed, shifts the fuck out of quantum sync and vanishes into air, into thin air. Ah! But the hook is that Caine doesn’t simply fade into transparency like Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance; he disappears layer by layer. First skin, then muscles, then veins and organs, you get the idea. It’s like those Bodies exhibits, but without that creepy thought that a Chinese prisoner had to die to make your trip to the South Street Seaport worthwhile.

Seeing Kevin Bacon’s pancreas and central nervous system do make for a cool 5 minutes, not only for the scene’s then-novel use of special effects but for its graphic, mildly disturbing look at human physiology that also marked the coolest parts of RoboCop and Total Recall.

Had Hollow Man stayed on this trajectory it might have been a nice transition for Verhoeven into the realm of CGI (a transition that began with Starship Troopers). But no sooner does invisible Bacon go invisible nuts that the film turns into the same monster-picks-off-team-through-metal-corridors scenario that science-fiction has been retrofitting since 1979, when a fanged xenomorph popped out of John Hurt’s stomach and turned the Nostromo into its own personal Ponderosa Steakhouse.

Given some time, though, I can see Hollow Man carving out a nice little niche for itself as an offbeat special-effects sideshow: in the same Netflix “related movies” column as The Blob or Tron. Computer-generated art, unlike puppetry and latex makeup, don’t age very well — there’s a reason ReBoot hasn’t been immortalized — but let’s hope it does, lest Verhoeven’s flawless resume be cursed with a normal movie. If all goes well, in 20 years Hollow Man could come to be seen as our generation’s Clash of the Titans, just with a lot more exposed titties.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:03:00 -0400

Year 2000 Trademarks:

Fake MTV News brief with Kurt Loader
Nu metal soundtrack (including System of a Down)
“Goths aren’t evil!” debate

The best part of re-watching Book of Shadows, 2000’s follow-up to The Blair Witch Project, isn’t watching the film at all, but re-visiting (by proxy) the Great Blair Witch Craze that the sequel proved the culmination of. America in 1999, not yet interested in which cave bin Laden was inside and no longer interested in whose mouth the president was, turned its full attention instead to the story of three film majors who tote cameras into the Maryland woods, get lost, and find themselves thrown into a scenario terrifying even by student film standards.

We all know the story: The Blair Witch Project was a no-budget film that, thanks to a clever premise, ahead-of-its-time marketing tactics, eerily natural performances from its three stars*, and some genuine thrills grossed (to date) a quarter of a billion dollars. More importantly, the movie became more damn ubiquitous than just about any film since.

It’s difficult to imagine in 2010 the significance a single motion picture could once have. Today, movies are so desperate for attention they’ve literally added an entire dimension. The Blair Witch Project represents the last time every type of American citizen was talking about the same movie at the same time. If you were alive and possessed optic nerves in the summer of 1999, you saw The Blair Witch Project. It was like a shopping mall version of the Camp David Summits, bringing together diverse cultures of the era, form rich kids in Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts to dudes who Sharpied their fingernails black during statistics class to your Tae Bo-toned stepmother, for the shared goal of being scared shitless and watching shaky cameras pointed at leaves. If the morlocks had taken over planet Earth that July, they would’ve lured the eloi with promises of a free underground Blair Witch screening. And if parody is representative of cultural influence, than The Blair Witch Project was like The Renaissance meets The Beatles meets season one of Survivor. Blair Witch parody in fact became an industry unto itself, supporting not one, but two feature spoofs: The Bogus Witch Project and Steve Odenkirk’s The Blair Thumb.

This simply doesn’t happen anymore. Even Inception, the first film in a while that was talked about for more than a week after its release, lasted a fraction of how long The Blair Witch stuck around. And to last just that long Christopher Nolan had to make the most complicated mainstream film of all time. Somewhat ironically, the source of modern Hollywood’s attention deficit — technology — was the very source that propelled The Blair Witch Project to its phenomenon status. The film was marketed through the Internet in a way that today is glaringly obvious and by-the-book, but in 1999 was apparently more revolutionary than the decoding of the human genome. Every article written during Blair Witch Mania that I read spoke with wide-eyed astonishment about the ability of a movie to be discussed on the information superhighway. The still-active BlairWitch.com was hailed as a breakthrough in online promotion when it launched, and when the co-directors premiered the trailer not in theaters but on Ain’t It Cool News, it made it into a Time magazine cover story.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was how Blair Witch Mania ended: not with a bang, but with a hastily-produced whimper. To be fair, the sequel begins with lofty ambitions. It attempts to play with narrative conventions and blur lines between fiction and reality the way its predecessor did, presenting a fictional story about four Blair Witch Project fans (a sexy Wicca, a sarcastic goth and a pair of married historians) who hop in a grungy van on a “Blair Witch Tour” through the (fictitious) woods of Burkitsville, Maryland. They are led by Jeff (Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donovan), a potentially insane tour guide who resembles 80% of the supporting actors on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

That’s where the ambition stops. Book of Shadows quickly turns into the exact kind of horror film the original Blair Witch was a reaction against, complete with little girls in Victorian dresses, stabbings and NIN in-your-face editing. The movie ends (spoiler alert) with Jeff and the tourists accused of committing a brutal murder motivated by an “obsession” with The Blair Witch Project. “Sadly, as has happened so many times before in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence,” sermonizes a reporter. It’s a pretty eye-roll-inducing allusion to the blame that trench-coat celebrities like Marilyn Manson and the Wachowski Brothers faced in the late ’90s. It’s dated not because we’ve stopped caring about violence that much, but because we’ve stopped caring about movies that much.

*Heather Donahue, the awesome female lead of the first Blair Witch who improvised the most famous movie shot of the ’90s (the snot-nosed Donahue Confession), is today a marijuana legalization proponent who has written for the Huffington Post. This doesn’t have anything to do with Book of Shadows, but was too interesting not to share.

Road Trip

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:00:00 -0400

Year 2000 Trademarks:

Blockbuster Video jewel cases
Tom Green (specifically this scene):

When American Pie was released, in 1999, it was hailed as the rebirth of the “post-teenage gross-out genre” of the 1970s and 1980s. The ancestor it was most frequently compared to in particular (by, among others, the New York Times) was Porky’s, the 1982 comedy about horny high-schoolers desperate to sneak into a strip club. And why not? Both featured a pact of teenagers pledging to rid themselves of their virginity with humiliating, terrifyingly sexual results. And both featured a handful of tent-pole hard-R scenes designed to firmly cement the movie as a gross-out classic. (Porky’s had its hole-in-the-girls’-shower scene; Pie its pastry-fucking shot.)

But the comparison isn’t totally correct. Unlike Porky’s, which was a fun-but-nihilistic romp, American Pie had heart. Granted, that heart was interlaced with scenes of girls drinking semen-spiked Coors, but it was there. Just look how the film ends: two of the four friends may engage in wild, eyebrow-raising sex worthy of Lambda Lambda Lambda (Finch hooks up with Stiffler’s mother, while Jim has a kinky one-night stand with band geek Allison Hannigan after she famously informs him where a flute was once inserted). But the remaining two friends, Oz and Kevin, are used by the filmmakers as sermonizing tales on the dangers of rushing into sex, and the benefits of “waiting for the right time” (cue ’90s educational health class video theme). No, American Pie is less like Porky’s and more like rebirth of John Hughes’s mildly-naughty but ultimately heartfelt teenage films – a Sixteen Candles for the American Online set.

Road Trip is, in fact, the film that proudly picks up where Porky’s left off. It is a movie for frat guys who considered American Pie on-par with a Merchant-Ivory picture. Who considered There’s Something About Mary a flick “for pussies.” The film stars Breckin Meyer as Josh, a desperate college student who enlists three friends (including Sean William Scott, a/k/a American Pie’s “Stiffler,” that movie’s only morally vacant character) to embark on a road… um… venture from Ithaca University in New York to the University of Austin in Texas to recover a personal sex-tape (starring a topless Amy Smart, whispers my 15-year-old self excitedly while grinning a set of silver braces) accidentally mailed to his long-distance girlfriend.

It is here I should stop to focus on this driving plot of Road Trip. Its entire plot, its entire reason for existing is predicated on the act of communicating with a friend by parcel-mailing videocassettes halfway across the country. Much like Scream 3’s gags about cell phone memory, this plot-point places Road Trip at a very specific technological moment. It is not an archaic look at the early days of computers like WarGames, nor does it feature cutting-edge technologies. Instead, it lies somewhere in the Late Cretacious Period of the World Wide Web’s history in America. In 2000 the Internet was alive and well. Even non-technophobes Had Mail. This was, after all, a full two years after Nora Ephron had Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks soft-core cyberfuck each-other through dial-up modems.

What we didn’t have was bandwidth. Or at least not enough for the casual 2000 websurfer to easily share videos. DSL and other broadband services existed, but were by no means ubiquitous. (According to an article in the UK Telegraph, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much digital space as the entire Internet in 2000). If only Road Trip’s Josh had waited two or three years to sleep with Amy Smart, this whole situation could have been avoided with the purchase of a webcam. His crisis, however, wound up being a eerily precient warning about the dangers of leaked sex tapes that would go on to haunt various celebrities, fuled by the Internet, in the decade to come.

We’re treated to another example of the emerging Internet culture (and its dangers) during Road Trip’s climax, as Josh and his compatriots arrive at the University of Austin’s mailroom to demand the sex tape (the one with topless Amy Smart!). As they approach, they’re cut off by an uptight clerk typing frantically away on a laptop computer, reading with pride his online destination: “www dot Episode II, dot spoilers, backslash…” Not only does this hark back to a day when people were still looking forward to new Star Wars movies, it introduces the pop-cultural world to a new villian: the net nerd, prowling for spoilers and scoffing at the real-world problems of the decent folks in front of him. And what happens when the gang gets physical with him? He leaps from his computer and beats the shit out of them.

The message is clear, and we should have seen it coming: the Internet larkers are coming. And they are stronger and more violent than they look.

28 Days

Sun, 09 May 2010 12:00:00 -0400

In 28 Days, Sandra Bullock plays a boozy New York writer who gets sloshed at her sister’s wedding with Dominic West (what McNulty fan woudn’t?), crashes a limo into a nearby house, and is sentenced to a stint in rehab. Bullock arrives at the wooded retreat grudgingly — a city-smart gal who, even in 2000, is constantly talking on a mobile phone or typing away on her ThinkPad. Soon enough, though, her harsh exterior is melted by a community of loveable recovering addicts whose damaged lives we can only imagine (and have to, since this brutal analysis of addiction is rated PG-13 and doesn’t really want to show the, you know, unpleasant side of addiction).

This Sandra Bullock — stern, no-nonsense, a little bitchy — is the Sandra Bullock we know today. But it is a nice reminder of Ms. Bullock’s earlier, action-packed days that 28 Days should be most frequently rememberd for the abstract reason of not being Danny Boyle’s zombie thriller 28 Days Later.

The year 2000, in which 28 Days was released, nicely cleaves the collected work of Sandra Annete Bullock into two halves. And the first of these halves was Bullock’s breakout era of the mid 1990s, which includes testosteriffic blockbusters like 1993’s Demolition Man and Speed. Among the time traveling and exploding busses of those films (not to mention Dennis Hopper), Bullock emerged as the perky, spunky, Alanis Morissetey new face of Hollywood actresses. (In its review of Speed, The New Yorker called her “Claudette Colbert in the age of hard rock.” Which sounds like it was written by the oldest and whitest human being on Earth, but the point of which is still valid.)

Let’s compare that with the late ’80s , when Norma Rae and Working Girl had already hit theaters, when female empowerment was a perrenial 20/20 installment, and when Michael Crichton was writing Disclosure. Back then your typical female lead was Sigourney Weaver or Melanie Griffith: strong women with powerful permed hair and padded shoulders that made them resemble linebackers more than actresses. Women who could emasculate even Harrison Ford:

If this photograph hasn’t sufficiently tripled you’re blood’s estrogen content, I recommend viewing the music video for Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run,” from the Working Girl soundtrack. (I’m 90% sure I grew fimbriae after one play):

Young Sandra Bullock represented a dramatic shift from Sigourney Weaver’s Reagan-Era alpha-woman. She was, arguably, Generation X’s first female superstar (like a higher-paid Blossom). She wore floppy hats with sunflowers on them. She looked like Phoebe from the first season of Friends (or Wynona Ryder from Reality Bites). She probably owned a few pairs of overalls and a sang along to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” while recording a road trip on Hi 8. She was decidedly of her time. (Who else but Sandra Bullock could have starred in The Net, a picture about the looming threats of of dial-up modems?)

In my adolescent version of a perfect world, Sandra Bullock would have remained the sweet, happy-go-lucky fifth-grade teacher’s assistant whose floral blouse I’d stare down when she leaned over to help me with my long division. But this obviously wasn’t what Ms. Bullock aspired to – which brings me to the second act of her career. Ten years ago, Bullock abandoned her perkiness and never looked back. No more zany, free-spirited bus drivers or futuristic San Angeles peacekeepers. No more Forces of Nature. No more Practical Magic. Not even another Hope Floats.

2000’s 28 Days would be our last taste of that Sandra Bullock. The same year, Miss Congeniality was released. A major turning point. Miss Congeniality represents a clear and sudden turn of Ms. Bullock’s toward stern, powerful women – women who wouldn’t hesitate to plow their SUVs into the old, perky Sandy’s ‘96 Geo. It is telling that the plot of Miss Congeniality concerns a woman who must fundamentally alter her personality for her career.

In particular, last year highlights the post-Congeniality Bullock. She received 2009 Golden Globe nominations for two roles (in The Proposal and The Blind Side) as assertive, steely women who probably wouldn’t let their Honor Roll kids watch Demolition Man, let alone star in it themselves. For reference, check out the first 25 seconds of the Blind Side trailer. You can almost sense the 20th-century Sandra Bullock fade away amid a chorus of middle aged working mothers snapping, You go girl:

Oddly not from the year 2000: 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000.

Sat, 01 May 2010 16:26:00 -0400

Oddly not from the year 2000: 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000.

Relax, the Battlefield Earth website still exits. An odd bit of...

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:50:00 -0400

Relax, the Battlefield Earth website still exits.

An odd bit of Internet archeology: The official Warner Bros. website for 2000’s flop Battlefield Earth (a/k/a famous Scientologists with things up their noses) still exists. I highly recommend visiting the 10-year-old page for trip down Bad Memory Lane (just south of Bad Flash Animation Blvd.).

Best part: The empty CREW page still reads, “Coming Soon.”

From Independence Day Quickest way to date your blockbuster to...

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:42:00 -0400

From Independence Day

Quickest way to date your blockbuster to the late ’90s’/early ’00s: set a scene around a Frutopia (1994-2001) vending machine.

Zonino Likes 10YOM

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:00:00 -0400

The blog Zonino! wrote a very kind post praising 10-Year-Old Movies:

“A lot has happened in the last ten years. Watching some of these movies brings to mind a simpler time when our big concerns were Y2K, starting a successful “dot com,” and who was better - Britney or Christina.”

Here on Earth

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:59:00 -0400

YEAR 2000 TRADEMARKS:

Bleach blonde hair
Alt-rock soundtrack
Annoying “Are you ready for Fox DVD?” ad on disc (the one that starts with Tyler Durden saying, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” and features 90% X-Men clips)

THE MOVIE:

Weeks before his graduation, private school snob Kelley (Chris Klein) drives his cherry-red sports car to the wrong side of the tracks, where he flirts with All-American waitress Samantha (Leelee Sobieski). Witnessing this snob exchange pleasantries with his signifigant other from a distant diner booth, Samantha’s townie sort-of-boyfriend, Jasper (Josh Hartnett) slides over and confronts Kelley with a scathing, brutally honest assessment of the wealthy young man worthy of Hannibal Lecter (or Vin Diesel in Fast and the Furious):

HARTNETT (leaning against milkshake counter): You tryin’ to get at me, Richie?
KLEIN (fixing J. Crew collar): Excuse me?
HARTNETT (adjusting John Deer baseball cap): Yeah, Richie Rich. That’s your name isn’t it?

Richie Rich is not, in fact, Klein’s name. (Though he is wealthy!) He replies with equal ruthlessness, seething, “I would say that you’re poor.” And soon, the two young men are in a drag race (set, like much of the film, to a post-grunge single―in this case the Foo Fighter’s “Breakout”) that ends with both drivers crashing into a local greasy spoon and engulfing it in a 50-foot wall of flames that is insanely disproportionate in its violence to anything else in Here on Earth. (For comparison: The film’s second most violent moment is brief shoving match.)

The town’s folk-wise judge, in the tradition of great cinematic unorthodox rulings, sentences the two boys to rebuild the restaurant, which means Klein must leave his ivory private school dorm and stay in the care of Hartnett’s parents until the restaurant is repaired or they learn something about each other (legally speaking, of course). Not consulted in this scene are the owners of the restaurant, who presumably would rather hire professionals than remain out of business 5 times longer so two high-schoolers can improve their people skills.

At first, Klein puts up a cold front, making all sorts of snide comments to his lowbrow coworkers. But Samantha, who sees something in him, breaks through Richie Rich’s front to the tender, poetry-reciting soul beneath. The pair embark behind Hartnett’s back in small-town love — which according to Here on Earth consists of exactly two things: (1) walking through the woods and (2) sitting in open fields, picking at long strands of grass, tearing them into little pieces, and tossing those pieces stoically:

LEGACY:

At a glance, there isn’t much memorable or culturally significant about Here on Earth. In fact, nobody I spoke to about the movie could really remember the film during the 1.5 weeks in which I was (for some reason) telling virtually everyone I knew that I had re-watched a decade-old teen melodrama. (Somewhat oddly though, everybody I talked to about the movie’s cast commented, without fail, that co-star Leelee Sobieski looks like Helen Hunt). The two most blatantly dated aspects of the film are (a) a soundtrack containing multiple Goo Goo Dolls and Sixpence None the Richer songs and (b) this dude:

Bleach-blond hair. Thin goatee. Black tank-top. In the film he is Josh Hartnett’s townie best friend and has only a few brief scenes, yet every timed he swooped into any conversation set in a local convenience store or bar, I paused the film to ponder with awe the almost mathematical logic of his douchebaggery: Did he bleach his hair first, then, having decided he needed to look more like a meth-head, grow the wispy goatee? Or did he already have the facial pubes when the inspiration struck to Guy Fieri his hair? Or did he, like, time them to happen concurrently? (I suppose both at once would techincally be impossible, right?)

There is, however, one overarching 2000 quality to Here on Earth that deserves consideration: it was reveling in the drama of WASP-y, pastel-clad American teenagers in New England back when The Notebook was still a tacky paperback sitting on suburban coffe tables nationwide, and half a decade before Nicholas Sparks even started penning Dear John and The Last Song. Perhaps Here on Earth was ahead of its time. It was, after all, embracing teenage melodrama 4 or 5 years before audiences were ready to do so again, the way they would with not only the Nicholas Sparks adaptations, but with the moody vampires of Twilight and the Machiavellian teens of Gossip Girl.

However, it’s also possible that Here on Earth, which was a substantial flop, failed to catch on the way The Notebook (with it’s $80-million gross) did because it was simply a worse example of the genre than the later, more successful incarnations. It’s tough to say. By it’s nature, it’s separate good melodrama from bad. It’s like trying to say why, on Lost, Jack’s magical tattoos are silly, but Desmond’s time-traveling abilities are brilliant.

Yet there are clues one can gather in Here on Earth that clarify how bad it is. For example, take Klein’s private valedictorian’s speech (below) which he deliveres alone, expelled, watching his clsasmates from a distance and citing a Robert Frost poem like one of those cringe-inducing highschool yearbook quotes:

10YOM Featured On Cracked

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Sunday’s 10-Year-Old Movies review of The Skulls appeared on Cracked.com. Check it out here (or at 10YOM) and find out if Paul Walker and Joshua Jackson are wearing pants in this photo.

Ten-year-old movie Battlefield Earth got a retrospective in...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:56:00 -0400

Ten-year-old movie Battlefield Earth got a retrospective in today’s New York Post by the original screenwriter, J.D. Shapiro. My editor Jeff Rubin and I once tried to watch this movie. Not only did we turn it off after 10 minutes, but the movie left us unable to objectively judge all other movies we watched that week. Seriously. To this day I can’t tell you what I thought of Surrogates with confidence.

(via thedailywhat)

The Skulls

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:12:00 -0400

YEAR 2000 TRADEMARKS:

Concerns elderly rich perverts in robes (see: Eyes Wide Shut, The Ninth Gate)
Disc sold as “Collector’s Edition”
Stars of two WB dramas (Popular and Dawson’s Creek)
Spawned numerous straight-to-DVD sequels (see: Bring it On, Wild Things, American Pie)

THE MOVIE:

The Skulls, released in March 2000, is the second installment of Joshua Jackson’s trilogy of college-set thrillers based on the wickedness of Generation Y — following 1998’s Cruel Intentions and preceding Gossip (released a month later). It’s a thriller based on the real life Yale secret society Skull and Bones, a kind-of mysterious rich kids’ club whose former members include politicians, billionaries, and according to The Good Shepard an anti-Semetic Robert DeNiro. Joshua Jackson plays Luke McNamara, a lowbrow townie enrolled at an unamed Ivy League school who gains acceptance to the “The Skulls,” an elite club whose members apparently spend their time smoking cigars, attending vague, swank parties in big oak rooms, and engaging in other forms of WASP porn.

But the Skulls is composed exclusively of rich white guys and run by politicians, so inevitably McNamara soon discovers the organization is a corrupt, murderous cabal and sets out to free himself from the society’s clutches with the help of his hot girlfriend (Popular’s Leslie Bibb) and a silver-haired Southern sentator with a velvet voice played by William Petersen, easily the best part of The Skulls. He’s so good, in fact, that he somehow makes the impossibly corny final line in the movie my absolute favorite, delivered so overearnestly it would make his perpetually sunglassed CSI counterpart David Caruso blush:

What’s it like 10 years later?

IT’S AMERICAN PIE MEETS THE FIRM

I was 14 when 1999’s American Pie arrived in theaters. God knows how I got past the uhsers upholding the movies’ hard R-rating (there was an entire library of cons we minors used to get into the Screams and Wild Things and South Parks that every jr. high-schooler needed to see to remain socially relevant), but I vividly remember slipping into a Newburgh Hoyts and watching wide-eyed and slack-jawed by all the sexual escapades that the filmmakers percisely designed to widen the eyes and slacken the jaws of mid-pubecent teens like myself.

Today, the Internet has made this experience of relying on R-rated films for sex and nudity seem quaint. But back in the late 20th Century, household Internet was undergoing its own puberty. America Online provided some neighborhood kids with primitive access to the X-rated off-ramps of the information superhighway, but for most of us the only sources of female nudity back then were late-night Cinemax and moldy Penthouse editions stahsed under porches. So American Pie, with it’s voyeuristic shots of Shannon Elizabeth’s bare chest, arrived like a rare conjugal visit to my hormonal prison.

I’m not recalling these memories because I think anyone has an interest (or isn’t completely repelled) by my sexual history. I’m recalling them to highlight the “teen titty movie,” that genre of R-rated school-bound antics that had vanished from theaters since its post-Animal House boom in the 1980s. Like some kind of fuck you to the Regan Era’s family values, Revenge of the Nerds, Porky’s, The Last American Virgin, Weird Science, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and a dozen other masterpices picked up where John Belushi’s boner left off.

In the early ’90s, however, sexually transmitted diseases made movies about horny teens engaging in consequence-free fucking seem a bit irresponsible. America traded in the teen titty flick for puritanical network shows like Beverly Hills 90210, where teenagers, after “losin it’,” were rewarded with a teen pregnancy scare instead of a bodacious high-five from Corey Feldman. It would be 10 years before American Pie would start the year 2000 by reviving the genre and ushering in a new generation of teen titty films. Without American Pie (brace yourself here) we might be living in a world without a Dude, Where’s My Car?, a Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, an Old School. And we may not have gotten The Skulls, an unlikely installment in the teen titty genre.

What’s it like 10 years later?

IT’S REVENGE OF THE NERDS, BUT NOT A COMEDY (BUT STILL WITH A ROBOT SIDEKICK)

The Skulls, at first glace, seems to have little in common with any teen titty movie. It’s not a comedy, it’s pretty dark, and there isn’t so much as a single panty raid or sunglasses raised at the sight of a bikini-clad babe. And yet it’s still a college movie. The DNA of Animal House is in its veins. And once you realize this, the movie becomes a hilariously straight interpretation of ’80s college comedies. Essentially, The Skulls has the same ethos as Caddyshack’s tagline: “It’s the snobs vs. the slobs!” But it takes that ethos absurdly seriously. In this case the “snobs” don’t just run the country club; they run the country. There’s little in The Skulls that isn’t in Revenge of the Nerds: cruel preppies, losers vs. rich kids, robe-clad fraternal clubs, hidden cameras. Hell, there’s even a robot sidekick in The Skulls if you look hard enough. The Skulls most egregous ’80s college cliché occurs when McNamara rightfully challenges the society after finding (wait for it) an old bylaw in the university charter.

But where the bylaw in Revenge of the Nerds called for a simple decathalon to dethrone the snobs, The Skulls goes much, much farther, calling for a duel. No, not like a metaphoric duel of wits. A straght-up, Barry Lyndon-style duel. With pistols. The Skulls feels like someone who grew up without ever seeing a movie or watching TV or reading a magazine saw Porky’s, didn’t realize it was a comedy, and remade it as The Firm. (The result isn’t as awesome as you would think.) This is a movie where Happy Gilmore’s iconic snob Shooter McGavin isn’t just a preppy jerk, he’s the sinister minion of a nationwide conspiracy who will snap the neck of an innocent teenager without hesitation.

IT’S A PROPHETIC LOOK AT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION… STARRING THAT BRO FROM FAST AND THE FURIOUS

I hesitate to call The Skulls a good movie. So I really hesitate to call it a scathing critique of neoconservatism. That said, the film does deserve a bit of “F1RST!” props for even attempting to say something about George W. Bush eight months before the 2000 election, and three years before the invasion of Iraq. Both the younger and senior Presidents Bush were members of Skull and Bones, and The Skulls attempts to tackle this (when it’s not focusing on robotic sidekicks or duels). There’s something retroactively perfect about the vapid future Fast and the Furious star Paul Walker playing the dimwitted, privalaged son of an overbearing politician and former Skulls member (Craig T. Nelson). Even the following exchange between Walker and Nelson, easily the most cinge-worthy in a movie filled with cringe-worthy exchanges, feels intriguingly important 10 years and two Bush terms later:

Okay, maybe that’s too bad to draw meaning from. But there are other examples, like this extremely creepy image of Nelson standing in front of an ominous marble etching in the Skulls initiation room. (For extra laughs imagine it’s a screencap from a lost episode of Coach):

When Jackson asks Petersen, whose Dixie charm, salt-and-pepper hair and sexual secrets scream “Bill Clinton,” what the meaning of the etching is, Petersen answers:

LEVRITT: Those who wish to become leaders choose the ordeal of war prove themselves worthy of the privilege.
MCNAMARA: What if we’re at peace?
LEVRITT: There are always wars to be fought, Luke.

Corny? Sure. But come on, it’s a little prophetic, isn’t it? This was 2000, when most of us still thoguht “al Queda” was a style in which you could order your pasta. The problem is that The Skulls wants to, you know, have a message, dude, but it also wants to appeal to the Dawson’s Creek fans who just bought tickets to see Pacey driving a convertable and taking his shirt off. It’s kind of like a Rambo movie, which all want to say something about the cycle of violence behind Vietnam (Frist Blood), or POWs (First Blood: Part II), or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Rambo III), or Burma (Rambo), but also wants Sylvester Stallone blowing faceless baddies away with and M-60 or explosive arrowheads.

The Skulls has the the same problem, only instead of an M-60 it wants to satisfy it’s teen titty flick ancestors. So it is that just as Paul Walker and Joshua Jackson start digging away at the political subtext of the movie, they’re interrupted by an arrival of TOTAL BABES that, if you replace the Creed with Van Halen’s “Beautiful Girls” and it could be SNL’s “Schmit’s Gay” commercial:

Beyond the Mat

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Year 2000 Trademarks:

Entire subject of film
Abundance of Loony Toons apparel
Before the epic reign of John Cena dominted the Ring, motherfuckers

“The Rock isn’t just some candy-ass on the corner of Know-Your-Role Boulevard and Jabroni Drive. Tonight in front of the thousands of Rock’s fans all chanting his name, and the millions and millions of the Rock’s fans watching live, the Rock guaran-damn-tees to prove to you that the Rock is the most electrifying man in sports entertainment today. If you smell what the Rock is cookin’.” —The Rock, 1999

“Wrestling is theater at its most basic.” —Beyond the Mat, 2000

A confession: I’ve never really been a big of a wrestling fan. Yes, there was a brief period in the late ’90s when I found myself swept up in the weekly saga of WCW Monday Nitro (this was, as my memory serves, during an ill-defined beef between the New World Order and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), but that was more part of my lazy, 13-year-old tendency to watch literally anything TNT fed me between 1993 and 2000 (which is also the only reason I’ve seen Thunder in Paradise) than it was any deep appreciation of watching spandex-clad steroid-junkies throw eachother through particleboard tables while overcaffinated announcers demand somebody stop the damn fight!

Of course a decade ago that confession would be entirely unnecessary. Though both the W.W.F. and WCW in the 1990s were at financial high points, pro wrestling itself was in an embarrassing transitional phase: between its early years when it was considered a legitimate sport and its current status as an impressively performed act. In the ’90s we were still exposing the W.W.F.’s fraud, but not yet examining how impressive that fraud was. Today, on the other hand, the general public has ceded that there was something legitimate about what Doink the Clown did for a living. We accept that wrestling is fake, but hold genuine respect for the athleticism, pain and theatricality that goes into selling the fakeness. This new, postmodern form or respect is due in large part to a pair of films about the harsh realities of professional body-slamming released in the last decade: 2008’s The Wrestler and, more deliberately, its nonfictional predecessor Beyond the Mat, released in 2000.

What’s it like 10 years later?

TERRY FUNK IS THE ORIGINAL LAUREN CONRAD.

There’s no script for what happens outside the ring. This was the tagline sprawled across the DVD box of Beyond the Ring, indicating the goal of the documentary (and by association the W.W.F., which cooperated with the filmmakers): to rebrand professional wrestling from phoney sport to bruttaly real entertainment. The first step of this rebranding was to admit that, okay, the in-ring theatrics were essentially bullshit. That’s right: Yokozuna’s manager didn’t actually sneak a flamethrower past Nassau Colluseim security. The second step was to show that behind the bogus theatrics, there was another layer of actual drama: aging ring kings like Terry Funk, drug-addled stars like Jake “The Snake” Roberts, and family men juggling fatherhood with 9-to-5 bodyslamming like Mick Foley, a/k/a Mankind.

But here’s the funny thing: much of the offstage drama chronicled in Beyond the Mat feels just as fake as any threat Hulk Hogan ever shouted into Gene Okerlund’s microphone. It’s as if the wrestlers have replaced one level of phoniness with another. Or maybe, after years in the ring, they’re so used to improvising melodrama when the cameras are rolling that they can’t fight the instinct, even when the cameras are supposed to be of the non-fictional varitety. In this way, Beyond the Mat predicts MTV’s psudeo-reality-series Laguna Beach, which I guess makes Terry Funk like a pile-driving Lauren Conrad. In one especially suspect scene in which Funk and a former wrestling colleague have a “private” argument (though both appear to be knowingly mic’d), all that’s missing is a maudlin Summer Obsession single playing as Funk tearfully walks off:

It is telling that the most genuine parts of Beyond the Mat feature not the career entertainers the movie profiles, but their fans. One of the reasons I never took to professional wrestling, I suspect, is that most of the “hardcore” fans I knew were the same kids who beat the shit out of me in jr. high: angry white boys with shaved heads, ball-bearing necklaces and Austin 3:16 tee-shirts whose post-graduation plans involved (a) joining the Navy SEALS or (b) working for their stepdad’s welding company. As wrestling fans, my bullies were what I call “Nerds Who Beat the Shit Out of Different Nerds.” Getting slapped in front of your peers never felt good, but it felt so much worse when the offending palm belonged to a W.W.F. viewer whose love of the Undertaker seemed no less pathetic than watching Andromeda.

But Beyond the Mat, in its attempt to show the popularity and influence of pro wrestlers, actually highlights the multi-generational diverstiy of pro-wrestling fanatics far better than it does the wrestlers themselves. Take this brief interview with a family of Jake the Snake enthusiasts — including a bespecacled father in a Tasmanian Devil sweatshirt and an adorable girl with Scout Finch-like enthusiasm — which probably says more about pro-wrestling in one minute than the rest of the movie:

THE UNDERTAKER VS. CAPTAIN KIRK

So what feels 10 years old about Beyond the Mat? The easy answer is that the entire fucking movie is about profesional wrestling. But that’s like saying Hearts and Minds is dated because its about Vietnam. The whole point of documentaries like Beyond the Mat is to chronicle a specific moment in time, so calling it “old-fashioned” is kind of a cheap shot. It’s not like Scream 3, a film whose dated aspects (an alt-metal soundtrack, presenting Internet as scary new threat, etc.) were not intended to be considered “dated.” No amount of Rock quotes, bad music or Loony Toons sweatshirts actually make an academic movie seem, you know, old.

What does feel dated about Beyond the Mat is the tone, which floats somwhere between a genuine respect for professional wrestling and an ironic scoff at these fools who wear neon green muscle shirts for a living and still expect to be taken seriously. In this way the movie, ten years later, raises some important questions abou the nature of irony vs. sincerity on screen. When is a movie celebrating Yokozuna, and when is it simply exploiting Yokozuna like a Street Fighter chararcter? What Beyond the Mat reminded me most of was not Aronofsky’s The Wrestler but Trekkies, the 1997 documentary examination of Star Trek fanatics. Both presented themselves as serious looks at silly endeavors, yet watching either one detects a highbrow air. Listen to their soundtracks: silly “oompa-oompa” music pervades any scene the filmmakers dare take completely seriously.

Today, we take silly things like pro wrestling at face value, but in 2000 we hadn’t reached that level of conditional appreciation. It is worth noting that Beyond the Mat and The Wrestler were both written and directed by former writers of classic American satirical institutions (Beyond the Mat by Saturday Night Live writer Barry Blaustien and The Wrestler by Onion editor Robert Siegel).

Like all important things in life, this phenomenon can be bes expressed by Star Trek. The last Trek film released before 2000, Insurrection, strove to distance itself as much as possible from the cheesy 1960s origins of the franchise by being (by far) the series’ darkest installment. 2009’s reboot Star Trek, on the other hand, embraced the original right down to the awkward uniforms and clumsy art deco Enterprise design. Circa 2000 we were self-aware enough to demand A Very Brady Sequel, but not self-aware enough to make it without wall-to-wall winking references to how corny The Brady Bunch was. Compare the contemporary sci-fi reboots Lost In Space and Battlestar Galactica. The former did everything in its power to appear more “hardcore” than its 1960s ancestor: sexing up the Robinson family’s vehicle, replacing the amusingly mischevious Dr. Smith with the murderous, psychopathic Gary Oldman. 2003’s Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, embraced the original 1970s series on which it was based – going so far as to cast Richard Hatch, the feather-haired disco hero of the original, as a recurring character:

Reindeer Games

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0500

Year 2000 Trademarks:

Ashton Kutcher bit part (as in previous 10YOM “Down to You”)
Scripted by same person who wrote Arlington Road
Tongue-in-cheek con/heist movie (see: Ocean’s 11, Get Shorty, Heist, The Score, et al.)

What’s it like 10 years later?

IT BELONGS TO MULTIPLE CIRCA-2000 SUB GENRES

Reindeer Games arrived in theaters at the crossroads of two questionable sub-genres — one in its final years, the other in its early ones — that met around the year 2000: the Tarantino Knockoff and the Anti-Christmas Movie. The former, Tarantino Knockoff, includes an endless wave of tongue-in-cheek heist flicks like 3000 Miles to Graceland, 2 Days in the Valley, Truth or Consequences N.M., and virtually everything Guy Richie has ever touched. The Anti-Christmas film, conversely, was just getting started. Flicks like Fred Claus, Bad Santa, The Ice Harvest, Christmas With the Cranks, and Deck the Halls demonstrate that the 2000s were as flush with ironically depressing Yuletide stories as the ’90s were with hyper-literate bank robbers. (A fact either fascinating or pointless, or both: The early postmodern Christmas movie The Santa Clause was released exactly a month after Pulp Fiction, in 1994.)

Reindeer Games is a bit of both: a Tarantino Knockoff set during the Holiday Season. As the movie opens, Rudy (Ben Affleck) is released from a brief stint in the slammer for jacking cars and hooks up with an attractive pen-pal (Charlize Theron), only to be held hostage by her bank-robbning brother (Gary Sinese) to heist a high-profile Native American casino on Christmas Eve (which I’ve concluded is the most depressing place and time combination you could ever imagine).

In a way, the two sub-genres Reindeer Games falls between two are a perfect match: The Tarantino Knockoff strives to reach that dark, violently comic tone best reprsented by Resevoir Dog’s image of Michael Madsen slicing off a cop’s ear to the tune of a chirpy ’70s pop song. Timing your sleazebag-filled heist film during th Most Wonderful Time of the Year allows for all sorts of fucked-up moments like these — murders and drunken stumblings sarcastically set to the tune of “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas.” (Sadly, Reindeer Games lost much of its Christmas association due to last-minute studio scrambling to salvage what was a decidedly shitty movie: it was released 3 months after Christmas, and for a breif period was renamed with the most genereic title ever concieved: “Deception.”)

THE GREAT “BEN AFFLECK WAVE” OF THE EARLY ‘00S

You can’t watch Reindeer Games without considering the career of its star, Ben Affleck, in the decade since the movie was released. While I try not to make it a habit of crying over millionaries married to Jennifer Garner, I do find myself oddly invested in the tumultuous career of Mr. Affleck over the last 10 years. (Perhaps it’s the lingering Kevin Smith fan crying out from my 15-year-old inner-self.) At any rate, Reindeer Games sent me back to the great wave of Ben Affleck movies that flooded theaters between 1998 and 2003 (or after Armageddon made $201 million but before Gigli… um… didn’t). Falling within the great “Ben Affleck Wave” of the early 21st Century may be the most dated aspect of Reindeer Games, a film that is otherwise rather generic. The “Ben Affleck Wave” is familiar to any Kevin Smith fan who obediently followed Affleck from Mallrats to his post-Michael Bay leading-man roles. These include (in addition to Reindeer Games) Forces of Nature, Bounce, Changing Lanes, and Phantoms.

HENCHMEN ARE THE BEST PART OF HEIST MOVIES

Fact: In films involving a motley crew, that motley crew tends to be made of character actors far more enjoyable than their leaders, a random collection of familiar –- if not famous –- faces. My favorite example of this phenomenon can be found in 1996’s Twister, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, but in 2010 is way more fun to watch for the zany Tornado Chasing team, including a younger Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Joey Slotnick, Jeremy Davies and future In the Bedroom director Todd Field.

Reindeer Games’s bank robbing henchmen are no less enjoyable in their “Hey! It’s that dude!” quality. In addition to future Grounded for Life star (and MTV’s “Jimmy the Cab Driver”) Donal Logue and Dennis Farina (who, I finally realized, always plays a gangster, though never in a drama), Reindeer Games features Clerence Williams III, better known as Linc from The Mod Squad and Half Baked’s “Sampson!,” who has perhaps the funniest line in Reindeer Games, delivered at the end of an agressively dark scene: