Four former high school basketball players and their coach gather for a reunion in Pennsylvania. Twenty-five years ago, they were state champions. Now, they are all still struggling with the legacy of that championship season. George (Bruce Dern) is the mayor of Scranton and is in a fierce race for reelection. Phil (Paul Sorvino) is a wealthy and corrupt businessman who is having an affair with George’s wife. James (Stacy Keach) is a high school principal who is still struggling to come to terms with his abusive father. James’s younger brother, Tom (Martin Sheen), is an alcoholic who can not hold down a steady job. The Coach (Robert Mitchum) remains the Coach. All four of the men still want his approval, even though they know that he is actually an old bigot who pushed them to cut too many corners on their way to the championship.
Though Cannon film may have been best known for producing action films with actors like Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, and Michael Dudikoff, they occasionally tried to improve their image with a prestige picture like That Championship Season. Not only is this film based on Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play but Cannon also hired Miller himself to direct. (Before Miller was brought in, That Championship Season was nearly directed by William Friedkin, who directed Miller in The Exorcist.) While no one knew the text better than Miller, this was also his directorial debut and sometimes, his inexperience shows. The first half of the movie does a good job of opening up the play but the second half takes place almost entirely in the Coach’s house and is very stagey, never escaping its theatrical origins.
One thing That Championship Season has going for it is an excellent cast. Dern, Sorvino, Keach, and even Sheen rarely got roles with as much depth as the ones that they got here and four of them make the best of the opportunity. As for Robert Mitchum, he was known for being a mercurial actor but here, he gives one of the better performances of the latter half of his career. Because of the efforts of the ensemble, That Championship Season is one of the better Cannon prestige pictures, though Chuck Norris is still missed.
(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR! It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet. So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR! She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Wednesday, November 30th! Will she make it? Considering that she only has a day left, probably not. But keep checking the site to find out!)
I recorded Careful What You Wish For off of Starz on November 4th. It’s one of two films in which Nick Jonas appeared in 2016. (The other film was the underrated Goat, which I really should get around to reviewing some day. Maybe if I ever finish cleaning out this damn DVR, I’ll finally get a chance to get caught up on reviewing all of the other movies that I’ve seen this year.)
Anyway, in Careful What You Wish For, Nick plays Doug. Doug is kind of a dorky, creepy guy who spends the summer at his parent’s lakehouse. His neighbors are the Harpers. Elliott Harper is super rich banker and he’s played by Dermot Mulroney so you know he’s no good. Lena Harper (played by Isabel Lucas) is blonde, young, and always seems to be in the process of removing her bikini top whenever Doug comes around.
Doug is soon lusting over Lena and Lena appears to feel the same way. Soon, they’re having an affair that is probably about as torrid as anything involving Nick Jonas can be. Lena tells Doug that Elliott abuses her. Doug says that she needs to get away from her husband. Lena says that Elliott would kill her if she ever tried to leave…
And then Walter Neff shows up and starts talking about insurance…
Okay, no, he doesn’t. But he might as well because Careful What You Wish For is pretty much a by-the-numbers film noir. It’s obvious to everyone what’s going to happen. Or, I should say, it’s obvious to everyone but Doug. Doug is such a goony dumbass that his whole reaction to everything that happens can be summed up as: “At least I got laid.”
Personally, I think the film made a huge mistake by not having Doug wear a purity ring that he could dramatically remove before having sex with Lena. Seriously, this film could have used some moments of self-awareness like that. (And I do feel a little bit guilty about making fun of Nick here because he actually gives a pretty good performance in Goat.) But no, instead, we get a scene where a bare chested Nick eats an Oreo cookie and it’s kinda gross because he really gets into eating that cookie. I mean, Nick really tries to show us every second of pleasure that Nick gets from that Oreo. But the thing is, Oreo cookies are gross and overrated and to me, there’s nothing more disgusting than watching as someone dips an Oreo into milk and then gets milk all over their chin when they eat it. UGH!
But, listen — if you’ve ever wanted to see Nick Jonas roll an Oreo cookie over his lover’s bare ass, Careful What You Wish For is definitely for you.
So, if you’ve ever wondered what happened to Robert Redford’s Bill McKay after he was elected to the U.S. Senate at the end of The Candidate, I imagine that he probably ended up becoming something like the protagonist of 1998’s Bulworth, U.S. Sen. Jay Bulworth.
As played by Warren Beatty, Bulworth is a veteran senator. A former liberal firebrand, he may still decorate his office with pictures of him meeting Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King but Bulworth sold out a long time ago. Now, he just says whatever has to say in order to get elected, including pretending to have a happy marriage. He has become a part of everything that’s wrong with Washington.
Sick of both politics and life in general, Bulworth decides that he’d rather be dead. But, in order to make sure that his daughter collects on his $10,000,000 life insurance policy, Bulworth cannot commit suicide. Instead, he arranges for a contract to be taken out on his life. In two days, Bulworth will be assassinated.
Returning to California for his campaign, Bulworth gets drunk and suddenly starts to say what he actually believes. He attacks the Washington establishment. He attacks the voters. He attacks the insurance companies and comes out for single payer health insurance. With his desperate press secretary (Oliver Platt) chasing behind him, Bulworth spends the night dancing at a club where he discovers marijuana and meets a girl named Nina (Halle Berry).
(Platt, meanwhile, discovers that he really, really likes cocaine.)
Soon, Nina and Bulworth are hiding out in the ghetto, where Bulworth meets both Nina’s brother (Isiah Washington) and local drug dealer, L.D. (Don Cheadle), and gets a lesson about how economics actually work in the ghetto. Soon, Bulworth is appearing on CNN where he raps his new political platform and suggests that the solutions for all of America’s problems would be for everyone to just keep having sex until eventually everyone is the same color.
Of course, what Bulworth doesn’t know is that Nina also happens to be the assassin who has been contracted to kill him…
I have mixed feelings about Bulworth. On the one hand, the film starts out strong. You don’t have to agree with the film’s politics in order to appreciate the film’s passion, Bulworth is an angry film and one that’s willing to say some potentially unpopular things. It’s a film about politics that doesn’t resort to the easy solutions that were proposed by some of the other films that I’ve reviewed for Shattered Politics. Warren Beatty does a pretty good job of portraying Bulworth’s initial mental breakdown and Oliver Platt is a manic wonder as he consumes more and more cocaine.
But, once Warren Beatty starts rapping, the film starts to fall apart and becomes a bit too cartoonish for its own good. You get the feeling that Warren Beatty, at this point, is just trying to live out the liberal fantasy of being the only wealthy white man in America to understand what it’s like to be poor and black in America.
Bulworth starts out well but ultimately, it begins better than it ends.
For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at Oliver Stone’s 1995 presidential biopic, Nixon.
Nixon tells the life story of our 37th President, Richard Nixon. The only President to ever resign in order to avoid being impeached, Nixon remains a controversial figure to this day. As portrayed in this film, Nixon (played by Anthony Hopkins) was an insecure, friendless child who was dominated by his ultra religious mother (Mary Steenburgen) and who lived in the shadow of his charismatic older brother (Tony Goldwyn). After he graduated college, Nixon married Pat (Joan Allen), entered politics, made a name for himself as an anti-communist, and eventually ended up winning the U.S. presidency. The film tells us that, regardless of his success, Nixon remained a paranoid and desperately lonely man who eventually allowed the sycophants on his staff (including James Woods) to break the law in an attempt to destroy enemies both real and imagined. Along the way, Nixon deals with a shady businessman (Larry Hagman), who expects to be rewarded for supporting Nixon’s political career, and has an odd confrontation with a young anti-war protester who has figured out that Nixon doesn’t have half the power that everyone assumes he does.
Considering that his last few films have been W., Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and Savages, I think it’s understandable that I’m often stunned to discover that, at one point in the distant past, Oliver Stone actually was a worthwhile director. JFK, for instance, is effective propaganda. Nixon, which feels a lot like an unofficial sequel to JFK, is a much messier film than JFK but — as opposed to something like Savages — it’s still watchable and occasionally even thought-provoking. Thanks to Hopkins’ performance and, it must be admitted, Stone’s surprisingly even-handed approach to the character, Nixon challenges our assumptions about one of the most infamous and villified figures in American history. It forces us to decide for ourselves whether Nixon was a monster or a victim of circumstances that spiraled out of his control. If you need proof of the effectiveness of the film’s approach, just compare Stone’s work on Nixon with his work on his next Presidential biography, the far less effective W.
(I should admit, however, that I’m a political history nerd and therefore, this film was specifically designed to appeal to me. For me, half the fun of Nixon was being able to go, “Oh, that’s supposed to be Nelson Rockefeller!”)
If I had to compare the experience of watching Nixon to anything, I would compare it to taking 10 capsules of Dexedrine and then staying up for five days straight without eating. The film zooms from scene-to-scene, switching film stocks almost at random while jumping in and out of time, and not worrying too much about establishing any sort of narrative consistency. Surprisingly nuanced domestic scenes between Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen are followed by over-the-top scenes where Bob Hoskins lustily stares at a White House guard or Sam Waterston’s eyes briefly turn completely black as he discusses the existence of evil. When Nixon gives his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention, the Republican delegates are briefly replaced by images of a world on fire. Familiar actors wander through the film, most of them only popping up for a scene or two and then vanishing. The end result is a film that both engages and exhausts the viewer, a hallucinatory journey through Stone’s version of American history.
For today’s entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, I want to take a quick look at a very good movie from the year 2000 that not many seem to know about, Cheaters.
During my senior year of high school, I always wore a short skirt on any day that I had a test in my algebra class.
Why?
Because I was a cheater.
Back when I was still a student, I always struggled when it came to my math classes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work as much as it was that the work just bored me. Whenever my teacher was talking about square roots and x+y and all the rest, I was usually busy daydreaming about anything other than what I was supposed to be learning.
Fortunately, my sister Erin had been one year ahead of me in high school and had saved all of her old tests and quizzes. Since we both had the same algebra teacher, I started using her old tests as a study guide. It quickly became obvious that our teacher was simply reusing the same tests from year-to-year. While the order of the problems might occasionally change, the solutions remained the same.
Every test day, I would wear a skirt and, right before class, I would write the answers on my thigh. If the teacher walked by my desk while I was taking the test, I would just pull down on my skirt. Fortunately, the teacher was a male so even if he did suspect that I was cheating, it’s not like he could tell me to lift up my skirt or, for that matter, even get caught trying to look down at my legs.
And that’s how I managed to pass algebra without ever paying attention to anything that was said in class. I know that I should probably feel guilty about cheating but, to be honest, I don’t. If I had it to do all over again, I would do the exact same thing.
Perhaps that’s why I related to the character of Jolie Fitch in Cheaters.
Jolie (played by Jena Malone) is a junior at Chicago’s Steinmetz High. Jolie is one of the only students at Steinmetz to be more interested in academics than athletics. She also idolizes English teacher Jerry Plecki (Jeff Daniels). When Steinmetz’s buffoonish principal (Paul Sorvino) forces Jerry to take the unwanted job of coaching the school’s Academic Decathlon team, Jolie volunteers to help Plecki recruit an unlikely team of misfits and outsiders.
At the regional competition, the Steinmetz team just barely qualifies to move onto the state competition. However, no one on the team feels that they have a shot at beating the team from the far wealthier Whitney Young Magnet High School. As quickly becomes obvious, Whitney Young specifically goes out of their way to recruit the smartest students they can find and, as a result, they have won the state competition for five years straight.
Angered over the smugly elitist attitude of Whitney Young’s coach, Plecki obsessively pushes his team to study and prepare. However, with the state competition quickly approaching, the Steinmetz Team comes into possession of a copy of the test for the state finals. Obsessed with defeating Whitney Young, Plecki suggests that the students cheat. After being pressured by both Plecki and Jolie, the rest of the team agrees to do so.
When Steinmetz subsequently wins state, the Whitney Young coach immediately demands an investigation into how Steinmetz could have possibly made such a dramatic improvement in just the period of a few months.
However, the rest of Chicago is charmed by the story of how the Steinmetz team came out of nowhere to win and Plecki and his students become celebrities. However, when one spiteful student threatens to reveal the secret, both Plecki and his team are forced to scramble to cover up their cheating and prevent the truth from being exposed.
Cheaters is based on a true story, though I can’t tell you for sure how closely the filmmakers stuck to the facts of the case. (If you look at the film’s imdb page, you’ll find a lot of negative comments left by a lot of angry students from Whitney Young). However, what I can say is that Cheaters felt true. By that, I mean that Cheaters captured both the importance of competition in high school and the fact that, when you’re a teenager, everything is a drama and, as a result, it’s a lot easier to justify things that, as an adult, you would refuse to ever consider.
When I was high school, I was involved with both the Drama Club and Speech and Debate and watching Cheaters brought back a lot of memories. Cheaters gets all of the small details right — everything from the combination of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes from competing at an all-day tournament to the awkward attempts of “mature” adults to understand why winning is so important when you’re in high school.
Cheaters is also blessed with some excellent performances. As Whitney Young’s smug coach, Robert Joy is properly loathsome. Paul Sorvino brings some much-needed comic relief to the film and the scene where he awkwardly dances to the theme from Rocky is priceless.
The film, however, is truly dominated by Jena Malone and Jeff Daniels. As the film’s nominal protagonists, Malone and Daniels both give wonderfully nuanced performances. When the film starts, you find yourself rooting for both of them because not only are they likable performers but their characters seem so sincere in their desire to win. However, as the film progresses, we start to see the small chinks in their armor. We see how obsessed Jolie is with protecting Plecki. Meanwhile, Plecki goes from being an almost idealized teacher to being something of a megalomaniac. By the end of the film, we realize that we know far less about Jerry Plecki then we thought we did. Jeff Daniels gives a performance that forces us to draw our own conclusions about Plecki and his motivations.
Some people might question reviewing a film like Cheaters in a series about conspiracy-themed films. However, though it may not be as obvious as with a film like Three Days Of The Condor or JFK, Cheaters is a conspiracy film. Beyond the conspiracy to win the Academic Decathlon by cheating, Cheaters is about the much more subtle conspiracy that will always cause students who go to schools like Steinmetz to be viewed as being less important than the students at a school like Whitney Young. Cheaters is a film about a conspiracy, the conspiracy of cultural and economic elitism.
It’s a conspiracy that, Cheaters suggests, leaves many people with only two options: surrender or cheat.
On Friday night, I saw Moonrise Kingdom. As our own Leon the Duke explained in his own review on this very site, Moonrise Kingdom is a thought-provoking, relentlessly quirky little film from Wes Anderson. It’s a film that makes you think and, as a result, come Saturday, I was in the mood to watch something that required absolutely no thought at all. Luckily, SyFy was willing to help me out by showing an original film called Jersey Shore Shark Attack.
Why Was I Watching It?
I’d been meaning to watch a SyFy film for a while, mostly because my friend Kelly Thul always provides the most interesting twitter commentary on them. When I saw that something called Jersey Shore Shark Attack was apparently playing on the channel, there was no way I couldn’t watch it. After all, my BFF Evelyn refers to me as L-Wowww. I used to call her Evooki but, after seeing Jersey Shore Shark Attack, her new name is Nooki.
What’s It About?
It’s holiday weekend on the Jersey Shore. Preppies are uncomfortably mingling with Guidos, Joey Fatone is scheduled to give a concert, and greedy mayor Paul Sorvino is greedily dreaming of the money that will be made. The only thing could ruin the holiday fun would be if a bunch of sharks suddenly showed up and decided to attack the Jersey shore.
Which is exactly what happens.
Fortunately, when the greedy Mayor refuses to close down the beach, there are a few Guidos who are willing to do the right thing. The Complication (Jeremy Luc) and his friends Paulie Balzac (Daniel Booko), Donnie (Joey Russo), J-Moni (Alex Mauriello), and BJ (Audi Resendiz) take it upon themselves to battle the sharks. However, the Complication’s ex, Nooki (Melissa Molinaro), has defiantly gone sailing with a bunch of preppies and now finds herself stranded at sea, surrounded by circling sharks…
What Worked?
A lot of people are probably online right now talking about how “stupid” and how “bad” this movie was but you know what? I loved it. This movie was a lot of fun and, like the best film parodies, it was very smart about being stupid. Let’s put it like this — if you’re criticizing this film for having silly dialogue, terrible special effects, and bad acting, you’re missing the point.
Add to that, the acting isn’t that bad. The film’s stars do a good job at capturing the “personas” of their Jersey Shore counterparts and I would even go so far as to compare this movie to the classic South Park episode “It’s a Jersey Thing.”
Plus, Tony Sirico’s in it and he gets to go all Robert Shaw and deliver a half-crazed monologue about shark attacks.
Plus, there’s a reporter who says things like, “Stay away from the pier, yo!”
Plus, Joey Fatone’s in it! And he gets eaten!
What’s not to love?
What Didn’t Work?
It all worked, dammit!
“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments
I’m Italian (well, a fourth-Italian) and I don’t swim either. (Though I certainly don’t mind getting wet…)
Four former high school basketball players and their coach gather for a reunion in Pennsylvania. Twenty-five years ago, they were state champions. Now, they are all still struggling with the legacy of that championship season. George (Bruce Dern) is the mayor of Scranton and is in a fierce race for reelection. Phil (Paul Sorvino) is a wealthy and corrupt businessman who is having an affair with George’s wife. James (Stacy Keach) is a high school principal who is still struggling to come to terms with his abusive father. James’s younger brother, Tom (Martin Sheen), is an alcoholic who can not hold down a steady job. The Coach (Robert Mitchum) remains the Coach. All four of the men still want his approval, even though they know that he is actually an old bigot who pushed them to cut too many corners on their way to the championship.
Through the Shattered Lens 