Schizo review
They are the directing-writing team behind “Hoosiers” and “Rudy,” two
movies so ingrained in the jock culture that merely saying the words “You’re
five foot nothin’, a hundred and nothin’, without a speck of athletic talent”
or “Boys, don’t get caught watching the paint dry” will reflexively turn the
manliest of men into a whimpering puddle of tears.
“The Game of Their Lives,” the latest motivational speech of a movie from
the pair, is a deserving account of the underdog United States soccer team’s
match versus powerhouse England in the 1950 World Cup. But even though the
film includes many of the elements that make Anspaugh and Pizzo’s previous
collaborations great, funding problems and casting miscues render the finished
product disappointingly mediocre.
The treacly dialogue that fills “The Game of Their Lives” was equally
thick in “Hoosiers” and “Rudy.” Those who remember the “Rudy” soliloquy about
playing Notre Dame football instead of working in the steel mill will
experience a deja vu moment in “Game” when one player insists: “Momma, how
many times do I have to tell you? I’m not going to embalming school. I don’t
want to be an undertaker!”
So why is one movie great and one not so good? Sean Astin as Rudy was
impossible to forget, while the actor who made the undertaker comment is, at
this moment, impossible to recall. In casting the “Game” leads, someone
appeared to be looking for the 11 most identical-looking brown-haired actors,
with only team captains Wes Bentley and Gerard Butler distinguishing
themselves before the film is over.
The nonplayer characters are even harder to watch. John Rhys-Davies, well-
shorn after his work as Gimli the Dwarf in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, is
not only less engaging than Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers,” but a notch below Gene
Hackman in “The Replacements.” Equally forgettable is Patrick Stewart, who
narrates the film with the same patronizing tone one might use to read
“Goodnight Moon” at bedtime to a 4-year-old.
That’s the bad news. Thankfully, Anspaugh and Pizzo stick to what works
in the script, providing several genuinely moving scenes. Anspaugh also
deserves credit for insisting on location shoots in St. Louis — where many
of the players on the 1950 team lived — and Brazil. The result is a great
sense of time and place, making the protagonists easier to root for.
And while there are signs of limited cash flow in the copious game
footage (after the most pivotal play, the spectators don’t bother to get out
of their seats), the soccer scenes are well-filmed, without the quick jump-
cuts that ruin most modern sports movies.
“The Game of Their Lives” delivers its share of rousing moments. But the
first tears don’t flow at the 77-minute mark, when a military official gives
the David-and-Goliath pep talk that was handled by the preacher in “Hoosiers”
and Charles S. Dutton in “Rudy.”
Yes, large men in the audience will weep before the end of “The Game of
Their Lives.” But they can shed twice as many tears — and spend no money –
watching the Hickory basketball team run the old picket fence one more time
on TV.
– Advisory: This film contains some adult themes, drinking and one
instance of drug use.
– Peter Hartlaub
‘Winter Solstice’
Drama. Starring Anthony LaPaglia, Allison Janney, Aaron Stanford and Mark
Webber. Directed by Josh Sternfeld. (R. 85 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Because everyone in “Winter Solstice” is miserable, because everyone is
sensitive, because nothing happens, because people smile through tears and
tear through smiles, and because there isn’t a single explosion or car chase,
there will be people who’ll insist that this film is a searing examination of
the human soul. In fact, it’s dreadful, but it’s a special kind of dreadful –
the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.
A distinction must be made: Just because a movie is about sensitive
people doesn’t mean that it’s a sensitive movie. “Raging Bull,” for example,
is a very sensitive movie about a completely insensitive person. “Winter
Solstice,” by contrast, is a completely boring, counterfeit movie about a guy
who’s feeling some things. He’s feeling it. We’re not.
Anthony LaPaglia, a good actor, plays Winters, the father of two sons,
who works as a gardener and makes enough money to live in a comfy home in
suburban New Jersey. (He must be charging a thousand a pop to mow lawns.) A
widower for five years, he has to deal with a younger son (Mark Webber) who is
screwing up in school and an older son (Aaron Stanford), who, quite reasonably,
wants to leave home and start a new life. Winters has trouble communicating
with his kids — everything he says turns into an argument — and he’s
still busted up about the loss of his wife. He is the walking wounded.
That’s the setup. That’s also, in a sense, the whole story, except for
the entrance of Allison Janney as Molly, an unmarried woman who moves into the
neighborhood. Janney is a dynamic actress, with lots of humor, but Molly is a
cipher, a gentle, careful, innocuous, mild, lonely, smiling presence, who is
too much of a drip to make any man forget his high school prom date, much less
a deceased spouse. She and Winters talk a few times, and he seems to get
marginally better. The film’s depiction of middle-aged grief is antiseptic and
uninformed, and its depiction of middle-aged bonding is trite and unreal.
“Winter Solstice” is the feature debut of writer-director Josh Sternfeld,
whose screenplay was developed at the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter’s
Lab. It’s hard to imagine what the Lab did for him, as the film is scene after
scene in which little or nothing happens. In between scenes, there’s the
Sundance signature — acoustic guitar interludes that try to artificially
generate a sense of something mournful and magical moving through the lives of
the characters.
– Advisory: This film contains strong language and sex talk.
– Mick LaSalle
‘Schizo’
Drama. Starring Olzhas Nussuppaev, Eduard Tabyschev and Olga Landina.
Directed by Guka Omarova. (In Russian with English subtitles. Not rated. 86 minutes. At
Bay Area theaters.)
“Schizo” offers not just the proverbial window into village life in
Kazakhstan, but a panoramic view. Guka Omarova, an imaginative and keenly
observant director who grew up in Kazakhstan when it was still under Soviet
rule, sets her first film in the 1990s. So she’s able to show the awkward
attempts of locals to mesh their new freedoms with the more familiar Communist
system, complicated by the fact that there are no jobs to be found.
From the oddly humorous opening scene, the practice of medicine appears
to be suffering. A concerned mother brings her teenage son Mustafa (Olzhas
Nussuppaev) to a village doctor because the boy is slow to learn. His
classmates mock him by calling him Schizo. The doctor ceremoniously unfurls an
arm cuff. But instead of wrapping it around Mustafa’s bicep, the physician
takes his own blood pressure — an act so bizarre it couldn’t be made up.
The doc receives sour cream and eggs from the family farm as payment, and
crams them into a refrigerator already packed with jars of pickles and other
goodies bartered in return for questionable medical treatment.
Rudimentary gangster activity gains an immediate foothold in the town and
flourishes under capitalism. Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev), one of the small-time
operators, lives with Mustafa’s mother, and he hires the teen to help arrange
bare-knuckle boxing matches performed outdoors under the crudest conditions.
When one fighter is brutally beaten and on the brink of death, his last wish
is that Mustafa bring his winnings to his girlfriend, Zinka (Olga Landina).
The boy develops a crush on her. His inherent sweetness gets to Zinka,
and an unlikely romance unfolds culminating in his first sexual experience.
This scene is right out of “Tea and Sympathy,” proving that in at least one
area there’s not much difference between cultures.
With bangs down to his eyebrows, Nussuppaev looks like the fifth Beatle.
He’s an instinctive actor, and he plays the title role as far from a simpleton.
His Mustafa is a watcher, his dark eyes taking in everything around him and
struggling to figure out what it all means. The only time everything falls
into place is when he is with Zinka. Landina is enormously appealing in the
role, lively and indefatigable despite Zinka’s dire poverty. Tabyschev
displays a Russell Crowe-like bravado as a hood with aspirations to be a
contender. They’re all characters who stay with you long after this perceptive
film ends.
– Advisory: This film contains scenes of violence.
– Ruthe Stein
Fired Up review
Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Jail (Eric Christian Olsen) are lop scorers on the Ford High School football team - on and off the filed. When they overhear the girls planning a cheerleader bivouac, they decide to join up, attracted by being in the midst of 300 hotties. Their lark turns into competitive block up when the group they’ve joined has another craze at success in the championship, and Shawn falls for force leader Carly (Sarah Roemer) - whose suspicions and egotistic boyfriend ‘Dr’ Rick (David Walton) stand in the crumble.
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Uncategorized | Comment (0)The Princess and the Pirate (1944)
In 1944 wit Bob Hope was at the meridian of his game. Decades away from his cue card-driven TV specials and hopelessly elsewhere of manner movies like Boy, Did I Annoy a Terrible Compute! (1966) and Eliminate My Reservation (1972), Bob Hope’s pictures then were close on and funny. Along with be and frequent co-star Bing Crosby, Prospect was in the midst of a dozen years run on Quigley’s annual Top Ten list of Box Employment Champions. The Princess and the Pirate (1944), a specific of Hope’s finest comedies, is a meditating of that popularity, and a film that’s still great production seeing that the whole family.
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A spoof of swashbucklers that had seen a major revival since Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood (1935), The Princess and the Pirate stars Hope as Sylvester Crosby (yep, Crosby), a quick-change artist billing himself as “Sylvester the Great - The Man of Seven Faces.” As with nearly every Hope comedy, his character is an inept and unpopular entertainer, outrageously cowardly and lecherous. Aboard the The Mary Ann en route to the New World (”My act is known all over Europe! That’s why I’m going to America”), Sylvester rehearses in his cabin, across the hall from Miss Warbrook (Virginia Mayo), actually the Princess Margaret who, having run out on an arranged marriage, is traveling incognito.
The Mary Ann is attacked and burned by pirates, led by treacherous Captain Barrett (Victor McLaglen), known throughout the seven seas as The Hook. Disguising himself as an old gypsy, Sylvester is spared walking the plank after one of Hook’s men, goony and toothless sailor Featherhead (Walter Brennan) expresses an interest in the wench. Actually, Featherhead is after Hook’s buried treasure, and conspires with Sylvester to deliver the map to Casarouge. That night, Sylvester and Princess Margaret escape with Featherhead’s aid, and the two make their way to Casarouge.
Dismissing Margaret’s claim to be “of royal blood,” Sylvester lands a job for them both at the Bucket of Blood, a hilariously intimidating joint. Sylvester is nearly shot dead on stage, but beautiful, sexy Margaret is a big hit with the tough crowd of thugs and murderers. However, that very night Margaret is kidnapped by corrupt Governor La Roche (Walter Slezak), and Sylvester, by now madly in lust with her, conspires to rescue the princess.
The Princess and the Pirate was a Samuel Goldwyn production originally released through RKO. The picture cost $2.985 million according to RKO’s records, extremely lavish for a comedy in 1944. Shot in Technicolor, the film was made with the kind of money and obvious care most comedians of the era could only dream of. By contrast, Abbott and Costello, also in Quigley’s Top Ten, made In Society at Universal that same year for $660,000, about average. The result is a picture with high production values and colorful to the point that it closely resembles Disneyland’s archetypal Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the movie) or something straight out of the pages of Treasure Island. The film has an inviting air of unreality, with most of the exteriors shot on soundstage sets with painted sky cycloramas (whose wrinkles are occasionally visible). The film offers extraordinarily good miniature work, as good as anything in The Sea Hawk. It’s also populated with tough- and mean-looking mugs, from Mike Mazurki to Harry Wilson, with even the infamous Rondo Hatton putting in a fleeting appearance, glimpsed menacing a young lass through an upstairs window. Brennan is a real treat uncharacteristically cast as a grinning, cackling half-wit, very amusing. Marc Lawrence, better known for his gangster roles, is in fine form as The Hook’s first mate, while Hugo Haas, the Czech actor who later directed a string of sleazy low-budget features, is quite funny as the Bucket of Blood’s proprietor.
In the film’s funniest sequence, Sylvester and Princess Margaret arrive in Casarouge, a port so tough its citizens are robbed and murdered in broad daylight. When Sylvester demands the local constable take action against two such murderers, the lawman petulantly replies, “They have a permit.” After checking into an inn run by a crafty, pyromaniac of a landlady (Maude Eburne), Sylvester auditions for Haas’ cafe owner, who forces Sylvester to drink ludicrously huge draughts of beer, one after another, or get his throat slit.
This being a Bob Hope movie, there are a lot of topical references (to Sinatra, Gypsy Rose Lee, Southern Democrats), anachronistic slang, scenes where Hope looks straight into the camera and addresses the audience (firing a gag pistol that reads “Bang!” Hope exclaims, “Wrong pistol! That’s for silent pictures!”), and endless flirting (”Have you no backbone?” Margaret asks. “Yeah,” Sylvester replies, “But it’s nothing like yours!”). But The Princess and the Pirate’s period setting make it seem less dated than most of Hope’s contemporary comedies, and it holds up well today. Kids will enjoy the wild slapstick, but adults will either love or become bored with Hope’s rapid-fire joke machine style.
Virginia Mayo, in her first starring part, is quite beautiful and isn’t lost amid all of Hope’s wisecracks. Slezak wisely underplays his scenes with Hope, making an effective villain, while McLaglen, who would have made a great Long John Silver, is close to perfection.
One curious slip-up in the film’s scripting or its execution: a major character is shot dead in the back, only to wake up later with no gunshot wound but a bump on the head. How’d they miss that one?
Uncategorized | Comment (0)The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)
Aptly described by its creator as “more of a remix… than a remake,” David Lee Fisher’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” exerts fascination mostly as a digitized what’s-its-name. The endow with-winning vidgame designer scanned a restored type of Robert Wiene’s 1920 original, then used it as the backdrop over the extent of actors shot on blue-screen. Issue: An undeniably quick-witted commingling of a new cast (and spoken dialogue) with a silent classic. But pic fails to retain faithfully on its own terms, and begins to sea-coast on novelty value around the midway place emphasis on. After attracting curiosity-seekers through a smattering of theatrical bookings, pic could transform into a staple on what’s left of the midnight movie circuit.
Admirers of Wiene’s masterwork may be amused to see how closely Fisher adheres to the original scenario by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer (with contributions from an uncredited Fritz Lang).
Once again, the plot appears to focus on the heroic efforts by an increasingly agitated young man (Judson Pearce Morgan) to protect his radiantly pale sweetie (Lauren Birkell) from Dr. Caligari (Daamen Krall), a sideshow charlatan, and Cesare (Doug Jones), a homicidal somnambulist. “Appears,” that is, because, as in the original, the “surprise ending” reveals the nominal hero really is a patient in an insane asylum, and his narrative nothing more than a paranoid fantasy.
The new “Caligari” is best appreciated as a visually intriguing mix of images influenced by German Expressionism, shadow-streaked film noir and, occasionally, David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” (As a police inspector, Randy Mulkey looks like he could be the younger brother of the latter pic’s title character.) Seamless editing and crisp B&W HD-video lensing greatly enhance the illusion that contemporary actors have somehow inserted themselves into a classic pic.
Fisher’s “Caligari” is most striking when it showcases razor-sharp restorations of backdrops and production designs from Wiene’s original. Characters appear adrift in a phantasmagorical fantasyland of distorted perspectives, asymmetrical doorways, crooked windows, sloping chimneys — and streaks of light and shadow painted across tilted walls. It’s a mondo-bizarro world where officious bureaucrats sit atop enormously high stools, frowning down upon fawning supplicants, and sleepwalkers stagger across impossibly slanting rooftops, then race through forebodingly twisted forests.
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Although Fisher makes an admirable effort to avoid campy excess, the actors are all over the map. As Francis, the delusional protagonist, Morgan pitches his performance at a level somewhere between stylization and self-parody. Birkell conveys a hint of ripe sensuality as Jane, Francis’ fiancee, but she never gets a firm grip on her character. Krall fares best with shrewdly muted B-movie theatrics.
It’s worth noting that the presence of Doug Jones in the cast could ensure brisk DVD sales to fantasy and sci-fi geeks, since the actor has been signed to play The Silver Surfer in the upcoming “Fantastic Four” sequel, and plays Pan in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”