It’s almost impossible to watch ‘Pulp Fiction’ today without mentally checking off director Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic tics.

Great soundtrack? Yup. Aging actors rescued from obscurity? Yes, indeed. Dialogue so quotable you could print bumper stickers from every other line in the script? Oh, yeah.

But back in 1994, when the film first rocked movie houses, ‘Pulp Fiction’ was simply Tarantino’s entrance into the upper echelon of movie makers. The film hasn’t lost its zip in its new Blu-ray incarnation. If anything, the giddiness Tarantino fuses to the action genre is more appealing in an era of shaky cams and uncertain plot twists.

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Trials are a corruption of the entire process and only fools who have something to prove end up ensnared in them. Now when I say prove, I don’t mean about the case, I mean about themselves.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Though based on a true story, what you have here is Hollywood once again cherry picking the true stories they choose to tell in order to reaffirm a political agenda. In this case you have a sleazy ambulance chaser emerging as selfless hero in the fight against big, arrogant corporate attorneys and uncaring multi-national corporations. And if that’s not bad enough…

In the end, after our intrepid personal injury lawyers are unable to beat the big bad corporate America wolf with anything more than a face-saving settlement, in comes the ultimate left-wing hero to save the day. Enter, bum, bum, bummmm… BIG GOVERNMENT! Yes, whatever would we do without the benevolent Environmental Protection Agency.

Again, “A Civil Action” is based on a true story and by all accounts, unlike the bogus “Erin Brockovich”  suit, the facts of this case stand true. So my argument is not with the movie itself or this specific case. By all accounts this was a real tragedy, where due to toxic poisoning in the groundwater, a lot of people got sick and died, including children.

My argument is, however, with Hollywood’s relentlessly out-of-context, choosing of only these kinds of stories to build up the drip-drip-drip effect necessary to craft an unfair and dishonest narrative that always portrays corporate America as homicidal maniacs. As an example of how out of whack Hollywood’s lack of context is, I know of no American corporation responsible for as many deaths as the EPA’s politically motivated decision to ban DDT in 1972.

Where’s the movie about that?

That’s a rhetorical question. And here are some more… (more…)

After waxing poetic about John Woo’s talent for the last month, it may surprise you to learn that I consider his later career an embarrassing falloff from his Hong Kong prime. That such sad declines are all-too-common among directors (and actors, and authors, and painters, and musicians) doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow. I miss young John Woo almost as much as I miss young Steven Spielberg, and I don’t make that comparison lightly.

Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way: (more…)

Sure, you’ve seen it all before: an inexperienced nebbish who’s never experienced a moment of real danger in his life suddenly finds himself thrust into one life-threatening situation after another after meeting a crazed, adrenaline-junkie cop or spy. The two proceed to bicker and banter across a city or around the planet for the next two hours, offering viewers laughs and thrills without reinventing the wheel. 

Bruce Willis has starred in a million of these. The “Lethal Weapon” series wasn’t too different from the concept. But no matter how many times you’ve seen this story done before, there’s hardly a genre more entertaining than an action-comedy taking place amid exotic locales – and the new film “From Paris with Love,” starring John Travolta as a bad-ass CIA assassin named Johnnie Wax who’s forced to team up with a mild-mannered embassy employee played by British actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, is one action extravaganza that definitely delivers. 

“Paris” kicks things off nicely by showing the dual life experienced by James Reese (Meyers), who spends his days as a personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador in France, an existence in which he’s mostly planning travel logistics and handling paperwork for his boss. By night, or whenever the CIA decides to call him secretly, he is a low-level operative for the spy agency – until he abruptly gets the call one day to team up with Wax to block an assassination attempt on an American official attending a Parisian conference.  (more…)

Disney’s new film “Old Dogs” features two great friends and business partners as the lead characters. They manage clients together, laugh together and when one of them needs consolation, the other one is willing to help provide a carefree and wild night to help his friend forget about his troubles. After such a wild night unfolds in a flashback, the consequences come back to one character nearly a decade later as he finds out that he has two children that he did not even know existed. The plot of the movie revolves around the two friends trying to trying to take care of these children with their very little experience in the parenting department. However, although “Old Dogs” has some funny moments, the movie ultimately has more bark than bite.  

In the film, Robin Williams plays Dan, a divorced man who is great friends with his business partner Charlie, played by John Travolta. After Charlie takes Dan out for the aforementioned wild evening, that night becomes fodder for business clients during sales meetings. However, several years after the event takes place, Dan is told suddenly that he has two children that he has to take care of as their mother serves a couple of weeks of prison time for a minor offense. The premise of a father bonding after time apart is nothing new and unfortunately, the movie does not provide a lot of laughs from the idea. (more…)

John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard:

“[T]he system around which the motion-picture business has oriented itself almost since its creation in the early years of the last century–the star system, which it largely invented–has finally reached its end.”

“The eight most successful movies over the course of the year’s first eight months have collectively grossed $2.7 billion, up from $2.3 billion for the entirety of 2008. And what is most striking about these eight films is that not a single one of them, not a single one, features an unmistakable star. Three of them are cartoons (Up, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and Monsters vs. Aliens). Three are sequels whose top-line talents are incidental to their success (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the sixth Harry Potter, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine). Two feature relative nobodies (Star Trek and The Hangover). The first traditional star appears in the ninth-place film, which is itself a high-concept sequel in which the star mostly stands around (Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian with Ben Stiller). It’s not until tenth place that a classic vehicle hits the list, Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal. And after that you have to jump down to 15th place to find Tom Hanks in Angels and Demons. Will Ferrell’s movie tanked. Julia Roberts laid an egg. Adam Sandler couldn’t sell a ticket. Johnny Depp disappointed. Denzel Washington and John Travolta bombed together. Instead, the movies whose successes depended on their strong leading performances were the ones featuring the 57-year-old Irishman Liam Neeson (Taken, $145 million) and the out-of-work TV comedian Kevin James (Paul Blart: Mall Cop, $146 million).
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One day … ONE day after gushing over how exciting the recession is now that those forced to work jobs they hate or who have lost them entirely can focus on their passions, Natalie Portman bought herself a $3 million castle-like estate.

Natalie, whoever’s advising you … fire them. If no one’s advising you, find someone who doesn’t carry a small dog in their purse or dates someone who does. Look to the real world for help. Look to someone who’s spent a few years in a land where the zip codes don’t start with “9-0.” Someone who cares enough about you and your career to say (without any “Honey, babys”):

“Nat, past the gates of your community and away from the hills of Hollywood losing your job doesn’t fuel passion, it fuels despair, and working a job you hate is almost as bad because of the big black  permanent ball of dread it plants in your gut. I know you dig Barack, I did too before he targeted my children and health care, but you can’t flak for his recession. That’s what the mainstream media is for. You have to empathize with your audience, build goodwill. Besides, you’re closing on that castle tomorrow, so today wouldn’t be a good time to get all gushy over how exciting Barack’s recession is. And if you do, I quit.” (more…)

The publicity emphasis around director Tony Scott’s ”The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” is that this is not a remake, but a “retelling” based on the original source material, John Godey’s novel of the same name. Fair enough. After all, who wants to beg comparisons to one of the very best urban thrillers to come out of the 1970s? And to be fair, it is a retelling, though an inferior one, that still manages to stand on its own as a pleasant, though unmemorable, summer diversion.

Denzel Washington is Walter Garber, a longtime civil servant in the New York City MTA who started at the bottom and worked his way into an administrative position until a scandal hit. An investigation’s underway, and until Garber’s name is cleared (or not), he’s demoted back to dispatcher. His skill and knowledge of how New York’s intricate subway system operates is obvious and impressive, but nothing in his career or life prepares him for the call he receives from the manic, ruthless Ryder (John Travolta), the leader of a small team who have just hijacked a subway car loaded with innocent passengers.

Ryder wants money. $10 million (and one cent), to be exact, and wants it in cash in 60 minutes or he’ll kill a passenger for each minute it’s late. Unfortunately for Garber, Ryder takes a shine to him, forcing the civil servant into the unenviable position as the only person the hijacker will talk to or deal with. Aiding him is NYPD hostage negotiator Camonetti (John Turturro), who helps Garber through the tense moments but also has to worry if this man, who’s facing an investigation where a prison term could be the outcome, isn’t the inside man.

The “retelling” works as far as keeping those of us familiar with what came before from knowing what will happen next, but even so there’s not much suspense. What made the original so riveting was the believability of it all. Robert Shaw’s quiet, shark-like efficiency and Walter Matthau’s clever but cynical civil servant were characteristics we recognized from our everyday lives; these people seemed to inhabit a real world that, thanks to a remarkable cinematography, was perfectly captured in a familiar time and place. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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