TONY PORCO’S MOVIE REVIEW NEWSLETTER–SUMMER 2008 EDITION

Hey, folks–I hope that you’re all keeping cool during this very hot summer! I recently added Persepolis and The Hunting of the President to the short reviews page, by the way.

ON SCREEN:

STAR WARS--THE CLONE WARS: This is the first new Star Wars movie I've seen in the theater in twenty-five years, and only the second one I've seen with the pre-Darth Vader Anakin Skywalker of the three recent live-action movies--in other words, the good guy who later became a bad guy. In this animated movie, however, you'd never guess that there was any complication to the character of Anakin Skywalker; he's got some heroic moments, but mostly he's an unexpected teacher and straight man for a younger Jedi-in-training, Asoka (voiced by Ashley Eckstein). The two of them, along with their superior Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor), spend most of the movie leading a squadron of Republic troops on a mission to save the son of Jabba the Hutt from the evil Imperial forces. This particular quest, and the dialogue in general, got kind of tiresome as the movie wore on. I actually preferred the more exciting beginning, in which Anakin and his new sidekick have to stop an android army from wreaking havoc in a large city by turning off a force field (which provides the best animation in the movie). Of course, excitement is the main thing this movie has going for it, since it lacks the character drama and plot tension that the live-action movies had. The relationship between Asoka (who looks strangely like she walked out of an Egyptian painting and onto the cartoon set) and Anakin is played mostly for laughs, which is entertaining at first, but gets old well before the end of the movie (Eckstein's overacting through much of the movie doesn't help). The animation is very well done, although it resembles H. R. Giger more than it does anything from the six live-action movies. A sequence in which Obi-Wan arrives on Tatooine in a multi-stage vessel (the first I've ever seen in any Star Wars movie), and the opening sequence, with an eerie red force field our heroes have to shut off, are the two best scenes for animation. That said, no amount of good cartooning can make up for the tiresomeness of the script, and the grating nature of so much of the dialogue. (I should add that if you didn’t know what I was talking about for the first few sentences of this review, you’ll have a hard time following the movie, which is pitched almost exclusively at people who are already fans.) RATING: 6.

ON TAPE:

YOUNG@HEART: Many years ago, the local “alternative music” station, WHFS, played a series of commercials in which elderly-sounding people, or people with southern accents, recited lyrics from songs by Nirvana, or Sonic Youth, or other rock groups that were commonly played on that station. The advertisements ended with an announcer saying something like, “It’s not their music... it’s yours.” The Young@Heart chorus and their director Bob Climan directly challenge the notion behind that annoying commercial, namely that music is only “for” certain people, and instead embrace the much more optimistic notion that good music can be for absolutely anybody who enjoys and appreciates it. The chorus, which is based in Northampton, Massachusetts, consists of senior citizens from the surrounding communities who get together every week to rehearse and perform songs that most people would associate with their children or even their grandchildren–everything from the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” to the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” to James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” The movie shows them diligently rehearsing the hardest numbers again and again, as well as dealing with the personal difficulties that come to anyone of an advanced age. It also shows them enjoying life, and really gets across how capable they are of appreciating the unexpected material. When someone in their seventies sings the chorus of “I Feel Good,” or the refrain of “I Wanna Be Sedated,” it brings home just how wide a variety of people can appreciate the common feelings at the heart of those songs; I certainly hope I’ll be able to sing “I Feel Good” and mean it when I’m in my seventies. As the material suggests, the movie is by turns funny and surprisingly moving, especially as the audience gets to know the members of the group, and sees their friendship and group camaraderie. A sequence in which Fred Knittle, a man on oxygen in his early 80's and a real star of the group, sings the Coldplay song “Fix You” as a tribute to a lost friend moved me almost to tears. The only significant problem I had with the movie relates to the group’s musical director, Climan. We see how much he believes in the chorus and how hard he works to get them to be the best they can be (and at 53, while he’s at least twelve years younger than the youngest singer in the group, he’s certainly no spring chicken himself). That said, I wish that the documentary had focused on him a little bit more; I would love to find out how he got the idea to do this, how it got started, and what it was about his background and history that led him into this particular niche. I’m guessing that like the Jack Black character in School of Rock, he performed in more conventional rock groups that for whatever reason didn’t work out, but I don’t want to assume that without more information from the documentary itself, information that isn’t there. Nevertheless, this movie is a wonderful celebration of life at all of its stages, and as such is something we could use more of these days. RATING: 8.

LICENSE TO WED: I’ve been a fan of Robin Williams ever since his Mork and Mindy days. I’ve seen great movies that he helped make great (like Awakenings and Good Will Hunting), and I’ve also seen mediocre movies that were watchable partly because of him (like Night at the Museum and The Birdcage). License to Wed is therefore a bit of a novelty, because it’s the first Robin Williams movie I’ve ever seen that I really hated. Our hero plays a preacher who is famous for his outside-the-box premarital counseling, and because he’s her family minister, two cute ready-to-be-newlyweds (Mandy Moore and John Krasinski from The Office) sign up for his crash course in Marriage 101. Unbeknownst to them, the Reverend’s class consists for some reason of humiliating them in front of their (obnoxious) family, or in public, or both, again and again and again and again and again. We’re supposed to laugh out loud at this, but it’s hard to laugh when you’re creeped out, or irritated, or when your intelligence is basically likened to that of the wood used to make the church door, which is what this movie does many times. It’s hard to know who to hate more–the infuriating, nosy, and condescending Williams character, or the two young lovers who, for reasons best left to science, continue putting up with all his “communication exercises” and like nonsense. You may find your hatred spilling over onto other characters, especially Moore’s family, the worst of whom is the standard-issue Grandmother Who Gets to Say the Bad Stuff (a repugnant Grace Zabriskie). Another alternative is the weird twelve-year-old “choir boy”/apprentice/whatever who follows Williams around everywhere. He’s supposed to be a kind of Mini-Me for Williams, but instead he just swings between being really creepy and really tiresome. (Jill actually summed up this character best with one sentence: “I hope you write something scathing about him.” Mission accomplished, I hope.) Even the minor characters are designed to infuriate more than to entertain; in a fun-for-the-whole-family maternity-ward sequence, Wanda Sykes plays the Straight-Talking character who, like her cliched forebears, has no life or reality and no purpose other than to talk straight and further abuse the Main, and therefore Important, characters (a role that I think treads dangerously close to racism). As if all this weren’t enough, there’s almost nothing in the script that is believable, or makes any sense, or even rings true at all. The Reverend’s service is like a non-churchgoer’s bizarre nightmare of what actual worship is like. The good Reverend is prudish enough to prohibit the engaged couple from sex until the honeymoon, but not so prudish that he’s above lots and lots of classy, test-audience-pleasing double-entendres. The good (?) Reverend is so dedicated to interfering in the newlyweds’ lives that he and his Draco Malfoy-like sidekick actually bug their apartment and listen in at night (and it’s amazing just how much time this minister has to devote to the task of interfering in their lives, unlike some real-life ministers I’ve known, who actually have to, you know, run a church, and who sometimes have to minister to more than two people at a time–what a concept!) Of course, I’m willing to overlook a lot of implausibility and even some obnoxiousness if I’m actually laughing. Luckily, this is a Robin Williams movie, and the script still makes us laugh because it gives him lots of chances to practice his trademark mugging and quick wit. Well, actually it doesn’t, because in the context of this lame script, the constant riffing and joking just make Williams’ character even worse. I guess this proves that even a very talented and big-name actor can’t save a script that simply should never have been printed and sent to that Hollywood producer in the first place. (As a side note, I should cite another strange first of this movie. Like a lot of other recent Hollywood flicks, this one follows up the cute-but-ruined-by-bad-direction ending with teasing action over the credits in the usual Ferris Bueller’s Day Off style. Amazingly, this stuff is just as bad as the rest of the movie, meaning that it has the unusual distinction of being bad all the way to the copyright date at the end! Also, the Madness song “It Must Be Love” appears in the soundtrack, which is too bad, since I’ve now heard that song in not one, but two movies that sucked, this one and Someone Like You. The tune definitely deserves better.) RATING: 1.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: Here it is, folks, the quintessential Spaghetti Western in all its splendor. The words never quite match up with the lip movements, the plot is both violent (with a body count of something like 50 to 100) and a bit hackneyed, there’s no dialogue for the first ten minutes of the film, and Clint Eastwood is always prowling around somewhere, his sober countenance adding to the stoicism of the whole production. The thing is that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is still quite a good movie in most respects. The complicated story revolves around three outlaws, played by Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach–the three personifications of the title–in search of a stashed fortune in gold coins somewhere in Civil War-scarred New Mexico. It’s told with some astounding direction and cinematography, especially director Sergio Leone’s trademark wide landscape vistas that suddenly become frightening close-ups (although, since this is a spaghetti Western, the “Western” vistas were actually shot in the arid regions of Spain). Best of all is the music, which might just be some of the best ever made for any movie, and which goes way beyond the famously haunting main theme that everyone can whistle or play with their mouths blowing into their cupped hands (some people are better at this than others). All that said, I would have gotten into the movie more if it hadn’t been so long, or if the main characters hadn’t all been so amoral and hard to like (including Eastwood’s character, ostensibly the “good” one of the title). Wallach makes it all easier to watch by breathing an amazing life into his character, who is by turns funny, explosive, and malevolently clever. He’d probably laugh if I told him that nobody ever played a lowlife scumbag quite like him. (Luigi Pistilli plays his brother, a priest, in one unforgettable scene that fortunately survived the cutting that took place when the movie was translated from Italian into English, an edit that failed to make the movie short enough. It’s too bad that the priest character was only in this one scene, and that we didn’t get to know him any better.) After the long slog that is the last half of the film, I was very ready to find out how it all ended, and expected a great, rousing ending. Fortunately, the film delivers on that score and then some. RATING: 8.