Movie Review: Stunning Visuals Drive
The Green Hornet
http://www.tmrzoo.com/2011/19604
The Green Hornet is a movie that you will want to like in spite of itself and it is the amazing 3D technology and glittering action that keeps your attention, not the story or the acting by the two main actors.
The new Batman series opened the door for superhero movies surpassing even the iconic Spiderman – #10 all-time domestically compared to #3 for The Dark Knight (as of this writing) and what made the sequel to Batman Begins so special was the sublime acting job by the late Heath Ledger and a level of seriousness from director Christopher Nolan and film star Christian Bale. Rather than take a cue from this wonderful approach to the psychology of extralegal activities, rather than build upon the legend that Van Williams and the immortal Bruce Lee gave to a mere 1960s television program, director Michael Gondry goes sideways with The Green Hornet. And it’s a shame that he does, but – with that in mind, the motion picture still has merit.
The beautiful Cameron Diaz on the filmmaker’s approach said “This is its own thing…we’re creating our own version of it”…and that they’ve done in this visually stunning epic which is more about superb 3D and special effects than plot, character development and/or a logical approach to a legendary vigilante. “I want the head of the Green Hornet” is a terrific line, but the mobsters, including Christoph Waltz and co-star of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Edward Furlong are not used to their full potential. Indeed, as I write this, as if on “cue”, Seth Rogen is saying on YouTube: “We’ve been completely wasting our potential.”
Yes, the potential of what this film could have been evaporates with the comedy forced into a once serious figure, and the thought of a sequel taking the same direction makes the dedicated comic book/radio serial fan shudder. Batman Begins was the reinvention after Batman And Robin, the George Klooney/Joel Schumacher debacle/disaster. That Gondry couldn’t learn from the mistakes of past filmmakers means it is all about commercialism and not about art and commercialism. Christopher Nolan proved that you can achieve both without selling out. The look down at Gotham City from the skyscraper is dynamic movie making. Seth Rogen dancing with his girl-of-the-moment through his dad’s wonderful collection of cars (guaranteed to whet even Jay Leno’s appetite for autos), is beautifully recorded, but that should have been the end of the jokes. It worked, but like a sophomore excited by the positive reaction he gets from one great line, the timing is lost and with it the balance so necessary for repeated viewings.
If Avatar gave us a glimpse of extraordinary 3D in a fantasy world, The Green Hornet does succeed in proving that 3D can take the settings in our everyday reality and make it all a spectacular film experience. Too bad the superb performance of Cameron Diaz wasn’t an inspiration to the rest of the cast. Yes, the film is entertaining, but it certainly isn’t The Green Hornet. Guess we’ll have to wait till June 2011 when Ryan Reynolds hits the screen as The Green Lantern.
Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He was a film critic for Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com and produces and hosts Visual Radio. Visual Radio is a fifteen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed John Lennon’s Uncle Charlie, Margaret Cho, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Felix Cavaliere, Marty Balin, Bill Press and hundreds of other personalities.
Joe Viglione's Film Reviews for January 2011
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THE DILEMMA
Posted 12:43 AM Friday 1-14-11
THE DILEMMA’S DILEMMA – is it a farce or a serious film?
By Joe Viglione
Keep in mind that Kevin James played Larry Valentine in the horrendous I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. In The Dilemma, Vince Vaughn plays Ronnie Valentine to Kevin James character of Nick Brannen and what could have been a smart film about trust, honesty and human relations devolves into some kind of misguided mix of comedy and emotion. Much like Seth Rogen taking The Green Hornet to a territory where it does not belong, the two slobs that are Brannen and Valentine just can’t be taken seriously in this dark and sometimes absurd indulgence. The usually reliable Ron Howard gave us The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Frost/Nixon and even Mel Gibson’s Ransom. All those stories had production values that made them believable. But the cringe factor rises up too many times in this movie which could have hit it out of the park with a better script and a more believable approach.
The caring Vince Vaughn in 1997’s The Locusts was needed here, but that actor took a wrong turn in 1998’s failed attempt to remake the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Psycho. Remember Vaughn’s awful job of mimicking Anthony Perkins at the conclusion of director Gus Van Sant’s folly disguised as another look at author Robert Bloch’s masterpiece, Psycho?
Why go through the motions when the idea of The Dilemma contains more promise and opportunity than the result gives filmgoers ponying up big entertainment dollars these days.
Here the two out-of-shape leading men might as well be auditioning for the sequel to I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, and the real shame is that excellent performances from Queen Latifah, real-life kleptomaniac Wynona Ryder here cheating on her fat movie husband (and you would too if you had to choose between handsome Channing Tatum’s Zip or loser Kevin James’s Larry…I mean…Nick)…Jennifer Connelly as well as the director’s father, Rance Howard, and his brother, Clint Howard. The cast is tremendous, outside of the two lead actors, and Channing Tatum’s performance is nuked by what Vince Vaughn, Kevin James and director Howard bring to the equation. Connelly and Ryder are drop-dead gorgeous here and it is hard to conceive that they would be lovers with two outcasts, Vaughn’s borderline con-artist
Ronny Valentine persona and the stumble-bum/genius Nick Brannen creature who leaves the astonishingly pretty wife for nights at the massage parlor. Think about it, do 400 pound men exiled from The King Of Queens go to massage parlors when they could be home keeping Winona Ryder from shoplifting? It ain’t gonna happen.
I Now Pronounce This Nick and Larry is not the de-facto sequel to that previously mentioned bomb that director Ron Howard seemed to have on his mind. It’s an inside joke that goes sour and south right quick.
Re-imagine this with Vince Vaughn in a more serious role going after Chrysler for the big score, a Christopher Meloni type (he who loses the girl to Richard Gere in Runaway Bride) too busy working to keep Winona happy, and Zip (Channing Tatum) getting a more creative part in this mix. If The Dilemma were a true Dilemma it would have the makings of a great film. Instead, the best moment is when the film opens over a dark city and the Band’s remake of Marvin Gaye’s "Baby Don't You Do It" sets the tone. It’s all downhill from there and all concerned should have known better. The real intervention should’ve happened in the director’s office when Ron Howard decided he wanted to be The Green Hornet’s Michael Gondry, both filmmakers releasing unrealized movie themes on the same opening day.
Review: Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman in
Season of the Witch
A cold, cold January night in Boston for the WFNX premiere of Season of the Witch at the Regal Fenway in Boston (near Fenway Park, of course) and a packed house got to experience the kind of horror film that was common place in the 1960s and early 70s when American International Pictures put the works of Edgar Allan Poe on the big screen, a throw-back to the era of the Universal monster movies from the ’30s and ’40s.Director Dominic Sena (he of Kalifornia/Swordfish/Gone In 60 Seconds and Janet Jackson videos fame) pays tribute to the past masters. It’s interesting how Wikipedia writers can’t wait to get information on a film up before its opening and the collection of reviews there has Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir referencing Corman’s Poe films, thinking that Sena should have indulged Corman more and other elements less.
My perspective is that slasher thrillers have done serious damage to the genre. I Know What You Did Last Summer, A Nightmare On Elm Street and Halloween all spawned series of their own, and that probably won’t happen here. This appears to be a one-off ode to multiple blood and gore genres, from Zack Snyder’s cataclysmic swordfight indulgence 300 – which they could have cut and pasted for the first portion of this movie, to The Mask Of The Red Death.
Beginning in the city of Villach in 1235 AD and the killing of women for “consorting with the devil”, witchcraft (all spoken in 2011 English, naturally), to Nicholas Cage and Hellboy/Beauty And The Beast star Ron Perlman found 800 years later in 1332 crusading for the Catholic Church. If the Vatican had a problem with the Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, it surely won’t be happy with this dark history being utilized for commercial purposes, but the film jumps quickly as if it is a movie version of the Quantum Leap TV show trading in the hundreds of weapons for a bit of Medieval sword and sorcery…and the Black Plague to boot.
The great Christopher Lee is hardly recognizable as Cardinal D’Ambroise, from Dracula to Star Wars to this, it’s good to see director Sena indulging true monster movie fans their heroes. Castles and carting the witch to a far-off monastery the stay in Wormwood Forest is a cross between the first Predator movie and The Wolfman. There are some genuinely terrifying scenes and some great atmosphere but at the end of the day this economical 98 minute adventure might not hold up to repeated viewings.
Season of the Witch misses the A mark, the flaws dragging it to a B or a B+, but in this age of slasher flicks and buckets of blood, all involved get credit for giving it the good old college try. Irish actor Robert Sheehan as Kay could reprise his role to keep the Key of Solomon from falling where it doesn’t belong, but don’t count on it. The sacrilege, the demon-hunting, the wolf-stomping, dagger-driving fog-enshrouded mystery will probably earn its forty million dollar production costs back as the youthful audience in Boston gave it more of a thumbs up than the critics appear willing to.
Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He was a film critic for Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com and produces and hosts Visual Radio. Visual Radio is a fifteen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed John Lennon’s Uncle Charlie, Margaret Cho, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Felix Cavaliere, Marty Balin, Bill Press and hundreds of other personalities.
25th Anniversary Boxed Set: BACK TO THE FUTURE
All 3 movies digitally restored in HD, all-new bonus features and a limited time only digital copy (on three discs) this gorgeous deluxe edition has everything but extensive liner notes on paper. As we go deeper into our digital world, DVDs are abandoning the traditional paper essays for everything being condensed into uniform packages that need machinery to bring you to that world. Thus, this extensive essay will be that replacement guide, will give you insight on the boxed set that you won’t find elsewhere.
As much as I’ve watched the films repeatedly there are flaws inside these diamonds, perhaps intentional flaws which help make for mass appeal while denying purists a “Citizen Kane” of fantasy films. As James Cameron was able to get his motion pictures to surpass their scripts, Avatar and Titanic generating more funds than any other films in recorded history, one wonders if director Robert Zemeckis had gone hard-core fantasy, had he taken the entire project into his Contact realm, believable and thought-provoking. Alas, just as The Wizard Of Oz didn’t get the deserved sequels in the time period when Victor Fleming’s masterpiece took years to be fully appreciated, Contact also missed the opportunity to continue to tell its tale. But Back To The Future does keep on giving, especially with the bonus tracks, deleted scenes, never-before seen nuclear test site ending and so much more.
“The other me that helps the other you get back to 1985″ Christopher Lloyd says to Michael J. Fox. “You must be very careful not to run into your other self” Doc Brown explains as he opens up a huge money wallet with dollar bills from many different times. No one ever hears how the Doc got so wealthy, all we know is that the enemy, Biff Tannen (creepy antagonist played by Thomas F. Wilson) is to be denied being rich and famous so that Doc and Marty can have all the fun.
Stolen plutonium from Libyan terrorists is an awkward way to begin a family movie, but – truth be told – it is an adventure film disguised as a flick for the general public. Back To The Future is more of a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of Sci-Fi meets black humor, taking director James Whale’s nightmares and filling them with color, catastrophe and redemption.
The dysfunctional McFly household that Michael J. Fox has to run from is Leave it To Beaver in reverse, doing to middle America and fantasy films what Spinal Tap did for rock musicians – total wild-eyed parody. Yet, as hinted at above, no one can deny the commercial success of the Back To The Future series and this boxed set is a well-deserved and long-awaited accomplishment. One could see the late Divine playing the role of Lorraine Baines McFly, or George McFly for that matter, and get away with it. The characters are built on cringe-factor idiosyncrasies and twisted peculiarities that magnify human frailties, needing the escapism that time travel provides…get away from reality, go back into the past and change the future for the better.
Robert Lee Zemeckis is a brilliant director and one could only hope that he go back to his Back To The Future idea with the seriousness that he gave Contact. The goofy asides that made his Forrest Gump such a hit (and, at the same time, probably made many a viewer question if they should laugh at such naiveté) are the indulgences that make repeated viewings less appealing to me, but what do I know? Zemeckis clearly had his finger on the pulse of society and the mainstream gobbled up this fascinating adventure into psychology mixed with sci-fi. Call it Psych-ience Fiction…psyience fiction for short! It’s a mini-Star Wars without the overwhelming exhilaration of a “Return Of The Jedi” or “The Empire Strikes Back”, taking Flash Gordon to the next level, a landmark of Science Fiction movie making that Back To the Future could have rivaled with a few tweaks and advanced ideas.
*****
The AMC televised reruns give four stars to the first installment, two stars to the second and three stars for the third. A pretty good barometer. Marty McFly is the cool anti-hero, but Doc Emmit Brown is so out-to-lunch that the logical mind which stops suspending belief; has to wonder if anyone realizes how insane he truly is. Doc Brown is as crazed as Marty’s mom, Lorraine McFly, probably the two zaniest people in the drama, and what does that say about Marty with his major influences being so hell-bent on self-destruction?
Ah, but the time machine. Brilliantly played by John DeLorean’s famous car three years after the real DeLorean’s 1982 entrapment drug bust, another tongue-in-cheek you can’t do that and get away with it moment that works just fine.
The Time Continuum disrupted…everything “skewed into this tangent creating an alternate 1985″. The look at 2015 is as off-the-mark as George Orwell thinking far ahead in his 1984. We won’t have skateboards that fly in five years…perhaps a visionary world of 2115 would have been more appropriate. But the instant anachronism aside, going to 1955 to an alleged 2015 and back to 1985 is thirty years forward and thirty years backward was pretty unique and kinda concise. The saxophone in the Enchantment Under the Sea dance might as well be lifted from the Mos Eisley Cantina in the first Star Wars (1977) where Obie-Wan says “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Biff Tannen is that villainy, in a Three Stooges sort of way. The slapstick comedy probably helped the commercial success, much like Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine taking the credible writing of Forrest J. Ackerman and adding the televised Batman’s Biff POW and BAM exclamation points to the detriment of the art.
When Marty looks at Old Biff-from-the-future’s cane in Doc’s house the thunder sounds exactly like that in The Matrix when Morpheus is talking to Neo about “the real world” in the simulated reality. “Son of a bitch stole my idea” Michael J. Fox says, “The whole thing is my fault.” The Waichowski Brothers indeed stole ideas from every great (and not so great) science fiction picture, Galaxy Quest, Star Wars, The Terminator etc. And didn’t Neo think things were his fault? The Back To The Future trilogy is as much an inspiration for the Matrix Trilogy as anything else the Waichowski’s chose to borrow from. Doc is Morpheus, Marty is Neo, the teacher and the student, or the manipulator and the errand boy, it works well with both trilogies. Keep in mind that the original “trilogy” series in fantasy films, in my opinion, were the three Boris Karloff Frankenstein pictures – Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son Of Frankenstein
(1939) where Karloff played the monster. Yes, like the Superman series, these films scattered themselves into multiple sequels, but the three part story was most succinct in its ability to entertain, tell a story and have hidden philosophy and hidden messages play mind tricks, keeping all the great film series that chose the three-fer popular generation after generation.
Back To The Future is the anomaly. Its shading of genres keeps it outside the norm, not as sincere as Frankenstein, as bold as Star Wars, as hard-hitting as The Matrix (and didn’t The Matrix sequels absolutely copy the Back To The Future formula of filming both sequels at the same time?), this time transport film supercedes The Time Travelers Wife and filmed versions of H.G. Wells The Time Machine. Doc Brown upgraded from his DeLorean car to a Jules Verne Train. What I’d like to see is a parallel universe Back To The Future, not going where George Lucas chose to go when he took Star Wars several steps back, but moving forward, taking the concept of Back To The Future to a world without George W. Bush, a world without the specter of George Orwell’s 1984, a brave new world where people can change the future for the better. Now that would be something to rival the eventual Avatar trilogy.
Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He was a film critic for Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com and produces and hosts Visual Radio. Visual Radio is a fifteen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed John Lennon’s Uncle Charlie, Margaret Cho, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Felix Cavaliere, Marty Balin, Bill Press and hundreds of other personalities.
