Tag Archives: review

FREEDOM!!! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

I’m passionate about movies, but my day job consists of providing high quality tax planning and preparation services for a wide variety of clients in the Central Arkansas area. After a couple of months of 70-90 hour work weeks, April 16th is the day that I can begin to focus a little less on work and a little more on the things I truly love. I can’t wait to continue to share my passion for movies, music, Charles Bronson, Chow Yun-Fat, and so many other things with all of you. I need a few days to get some rest and get my mind straight, but I’ll soon be back to sharing my opinions and my life! Thanks to all of you who read my work! ❤️

Film Review: Short Cuts (dir by Robert Altman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Opening with a swarm of helicopters spaying for medflies and ending with an earthquake, 1993’s Short Cuts is a film about life in Los Angeles.

An ensemble piece, it follows several different characters as they go through their own personal dramas.  Some of them are married and some of them are destined to be forever single but they’re all living in varying states of desperation.  Occasionally, the actions of one character will effect the actions of another character in a different story but, for the most part, Short Cuts is a portrait of people who are connected only by the fact that they all live in the same city.  There are 22 principal characters in Short Cuts and each one thinks that they are the star of the story.

Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pools of rich people while, at home, his wife, Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), takes care of their baby and works as a phone sex operator.  Jerry’s best friend is a makeup artist named Bill (Robert Downey, Jr.) who enjoys making his wife, Honey (Lili Taylor), looks like a corpse so that he can take her picture.  One of her photographs is seen by a fisherman (Buck Henry) who has already discovered one actual corpse that weekend.  He and his buddies, Vern (Huey Lewis) and Stuart (Fred Ward), discovered a dead girl floating in a river and didn’t report it until after they were finished fishing.  (The sight of Vern unknowingly pissing on the dead body is one of the strongest in director Robert Altman’s filmography.)

Stuart’s wife, Claire (Anne Archer), is haunted by Stuart’s delay in reporting the dead body.  A chance meeting Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his wife, artist Marian (Julianne Moore), leads to an awkward dinner between the two couples.  Claire works as a professional clown and Ralph ends up wearing her clown makeup while his marriage falls apart.

Earlier, Claire was stopped and hit on by a smarmy policeman named Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), who just happens to be married to Marian’s sister, Sherri (Madeleine Stowe).  Gene is already having an affair with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), the wife of a helicopter pilot named Stormy (Peter Gallagher).  When Stormy discovers that Betty has been cheating, he takes a creative revenge on her house.

Doreen Pigott (Lily Tomlin) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic husband, Earl (Tom Waits).  Driving home from her waitressing job, Doreen hits a young boy.  The boy says he’s okay but when he gets home, he passes out.  His parents, news anchorman Howard Finnegan (Bruce Davison) and his wife, Anne (Andie MacDowell), rush him to the hospital, where his doctor is Ralph Wyman.  As Howard waits for his son to wake up, he has a revealing conversation with his long-estranged father (Jack Lemmon, showing up for one scene and delivering an amazing monologue).  Meanwhile, a baker named Andy (Lyle Lovett) repeatedly calls the Finnegan household, wanting to know when they’re going to pick up their son’s birthday cake.

Based on the short stories of Raymond Carver and directed by Robert Altman, Short Cuts can sometimes feel like a spiritual descendent of Altman’s Nashville.  The difference between this film and Nashville is that Short Cuts doesn’t have the previous film’s satiric bite.  As good as Nashville is, it’s a film that can be rather snarky towards it character and the town in which it is set.  Nashville is used as a metaphor for America coming apart at the seams.  Short Cuts, on the other hand, is a far more humanistic film, featuring characters who are flawed but, with a few very notable exceptions, well-intentioned.  If Nashville seem to be a portrait of a society on the verge of collapse, Short Cuts is a film about how that society ended up surviving.

It’s not a perfect film.  There’s an entire storyline featuring Annie Ross and Lori Singer that I didn’t talk about because I just found it to be annoying to waste much time with.  (The Ross/Singer storyline was the only one not to be based on a Carver short story.)  The conclusion of Chris Penn’s storyline wasn’t quite as shocking as it was obviously meant to be.  But, flaws and all, Altman and Carver’s portrait of humanity does hold our attention and it leaves us thinking about connections made and sometimes lost.  Seen today, Short Cuts is a portrait of life before social media and iPhones and before humanity started living online.  It’s a time capsule of a world that once was.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 1.13 “All Jammed Up”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network!  It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

This week, season one comes to an end!

Episode 1.13 “All Jammed Up”

(Dir by Ronald Victor Garcia, originally aired on May 25th, 1996)

Here we are at the end of the first season of the show and both Pacific Blue and Tim Palmero’s bicycle squad are still struggling to justify their existence.

There’s a couple of thieves robbing people who are stuck in traffic.  The thieves ride bicycles.  You can literally see Palermo light up as he realizes that he’s finally run into a criminal who can reasonably be subdued by his bike patrol.  Of course, it still takes them forever to catch the guy.  Whenever the bike criminal would escape and Palermo or TC would say, “We’ll get him next time,” I was reminded of Mike Brady trying to sell his terrible architectural designs in The Brady Bunch Movie and assuring his desperate boss that the next client would definitely want their gas station or restaurant to look just like the Brady house.

Meanwhile, Chris and and Cory go undercover as escorts in order to catch an arms dealer who is staying at a hotel and who has a thing for sex workers.  Chris is not happy with assignment and complains about it.  Normally, I would agree because it really is a degrading assignment.  (The arms dealers can be identified only by a tattoo on his behind.)  But Chris whines about everything so I have to admit that I didn’t have as much sympathy as I should have had.

Cory, along with her undercover work, is upset because her boyfriend (Ken Olandt) refuses to tell his parents that she’s a bike cop.  Her boyfriend’s father was played by Robert Pine, the sergeant from CHiPs.  That was amusing.

Meanwhile, Elvis wants to ask someone out.  TC gives him advice and, in a nod to Cyrano, tells Elvis what to say.  Hey, TC — there’s a crime wave going on!  Or maybe you didn’t notice….

This was a pretty pointless way to end the season but …. eh, it’s Pacific Blue.  It’s pretty much what I was expecting from this show.  This first season was pretty bad.  I can’t really think of a single episode that didn’t get on my nerves in some way.  Way too much time was spent this season on people saying, “They ride bikes?”  Yes, they ride bikes.  They look stupid and I would be kind of angry if I was the victim of a crime and any of these losers showed up but at some point, both the show and the audience will have to accept that it is what it is.  The show is about cops on bicycles.  Every episode during the first season seemed to be designed to make us go, “Okay, they’re real cops!”  But if you’re still having to convince the audience of that thirteen episodes in, it’s a problem.

Oh well.  Season 2 starts next week!

 

Film Review: Into the Wild (dir by Sean Penn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

He went looking for America but couldn’t find it.

That’s not actually the tag line that was used to advertise 2007’s Into The Wild but perhaps it should have been.  Based on the true story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate who gave away all of his money and then roamed the country for two years before starving to death in an abandoned bus in Alaska, Into The Wild seems to be Sean Penn’s attempt to make a modern-day Easy Rider.  Just as Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda crossed the country and met several different people over the course of that seminal road film, Into The Wild follows Emile Hirsch’s Chris McCandless as he takes on the identity of Alexander Supertramp and hikes across the continent.  Along the way, he meets and befriends hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian H. Dierker), blue collar workers (Vince Vaughn), wayward teenagers (Kristen Stewart), and, most poignantly, a retired man (Hal Holbrook) who sincerely tries to help Chris make peace with his wanderlust.

You would think that this would be the type of film that would bring out Sean Penn’s worst directorial instincts but Penn actually directs with a very real sensitivity and a willingness to see the good in just about everyone that Chris meets.  It is true that, especially at the start of the film, Chris can sometimes be a bit difficult to take.  He’s so self-righteous and sure of himself.  He mistakes his college diploma for being a badge of experience and occasionally, he can come across as being incredibly condescending.  But, as the film progresses, Chris starts to realize that he doesn’t know everything and that he can’t do everything by himself.  Sometimes, he does need help, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.  The film’s most moving moments feature Chris and Hal Holbrook’s Ron Franz.  Ron has the years of experience that Chris lacks and Ron also becomes one of the few people to whom Chris is willing to truly listen.  And yet, when Ron offers to adopt Chris and give him a permanent home, Chris’s response is to promise to talk to him about it when Chris returns from Alaska.  As Chris leaves, it’s obvious that Ron knows that he’s never going to see Chris again.  Dying in Alaska, Chris finally makes some sort of inner peace with the parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and the sister (Jena Malone) that he earlier abandoned.  It’s an amazingly touching scene.  Penn, whose other directorial efforts have been a bit didactic, seems to be willing to grant a certain grace to everyone in the film, even those whose politics or cultural attitudes he might not necessarily share.  Penn not only captures the visual beauty of the America wilderness but also the beauty of the people, a beauty that too many other directors chose to downplay.

It’s a strong film and certainly the best of Penn’s directorial efforts.  Emile Hirsch is not always likable as Chris but, then again, the heart of the film is found in the people that Hirsch meets and Penn gets excellent performances from his entire supporting cast.  Hal Holbrook received a much deserved Oscar nomination.  I also liked Vince Vaughn’s performance as guy who teaches Chris about hard work before getting arrested for stealing cable and also Jena Malone as Chris’s sister, the one person who understands him, even if she’s not invited to travel with him.

Into The Wild is a poignant portrayal of  both wanderlust and the often-neglected corners of America.  Did Chris find a little of something that he was looking for before he died in that bus?  One can only hope.

 

Insomnia File #70: Shortcut to Happiness (dir by Alec Baldwin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you’re having trouble getting to sleep tonight, you can always jump over to Tubi and watch Shortcut to Happiness, a.k.a. The Devil and Daniel Webster.

When was Shortcut to Happiness released?  There’s some debate about that.  Though the film’s credited director is Harry Kirkpatrick, it was actually directed by Alec Baldwin.  (Please, no Rust jokes.)  The film was shot in 2001, in New York City.  However, shortly before filming could be completed, the film’s financiers were arrested and charged with bank fraud which led to the film ending up in limbo.  A rough cut of the movie appeared at a few film festivals in 2003.  By that point, Baldwin had started to distance himself from the film, claiming that he wasn’t given a chance to shoot all of the scenes that he needed to and that the film was taken away from him in post-production.  A newly edited version of the film was finally released in 2007, six years after filming began.

Alec Baldwin not only directed the film but starred as Jabez Stone, an aspiring writer who makes a deal with the devil (Jennifer Love Hewitt) to become a successful published author.  Stone gets his wish but it comes with a price.  In ten years, he will have to give up his soul.  Stone becomes rich and successful, writing books that have absolutely no literary merit.  He loses all of his friends and, by the time the ten year deadline rolls around, Stone is miserable.  Stone sues to keep his soul.  He’s defended by Daniel Webster (Anthony Hopkins), a man who Stone thought was just a publisher but who apparently is actually the famed 19th century statesman.  (The film is rather vague on this point.)  In one of the film’s few funny moments, the jury is revealed to be made up of deceased writers, including Ernest Hemingway and Mario Puzo.  The trial plays out and …. well, again, it’s hard to really follow any of the arguments made by either Webster or the Devil.  The film is so tonally inconsistent and poorly directed that I was often left wondering if Hopkins and Hewitt had even been on the set at the same time.

Both Hopkins and Hewitt give good performances.  The problem is that they both seem to be appearing in different films.  Hewitt gives a broadly comedic performance as the Devil, pouting whenever Webster argues with her.  Hopkins, meanwhile, seems to be recycling his dignified and very serious performance from Amistad.  Meanwhile, Baldwin the director totally miscasts Baldwin the actor.  For the film to work, Jabez needs to be young and hungry.  Instead, Baldwin comes across as someone who is already old enough to know better than to make a deal with the Devil.

It’s a true mess of a film but worth seeing just because of the story behind it.  That said, the 1941 version of The Devil and Daniel Webster remains the one to beat.

Previous Insomnia Files:

  1. Story of Mankind
  2. Stag
  3. Love Is A Gun
  4. Nina Takes A Lover
  5. Black Ice
  6. Frogs For Snakes
  7. Fair Game
  8. From The Hip
  9. Born Killers
  10. Eye For An Eye
  11. Summer Catch
  12. Beyond the Law
  13. Spring Broke
  14. Promise
  15. George Wallace
  16. Kill The Messenger
  17. The Suburbans
  18. Only The Strong
  19. Great Expectations
  20. Casual Sex?
  21. Truth
  22. Insomina
  23. Death Do Us Part
  24. A Star is Born
  25. The Winning Season
  26. Rabbit Run
  27. Remember My Name
  28. The Arrangement
  29. Day of the Animals
  30. Still of The Night
  31. Arsenal
  32. Smooth Talk
  33. The Comedian
  34. The Minus Man
  35. Donnie Brasco
  36. Punchline
  37. Evita
  38. Six: The Mark Unleashed
  39. Disclosure
  40. The Spanish Prisoner
  41. Elektra
  42. Revenge
  43. Legend
  44. Cat Run
  45. The Pyramid
  46. Enter the Ninja
  47. Downhill
  48. Malice
  49. Mystery Date
  50. Zola
  51. Ira & Abby
  52. The Next Karate Kid
  53. A Nightmare on Drug Street
  54. Jud
  55. FTA
  56. Exterminators of the Year 3000
  57. Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster
  58. The Haunting of Helen Walker
  59. True Spirit
  60. Project Kill
  61. Replica
  62. Rollergator
  63. Hillbillys In A Haunted House
  64. Once Upon A Midnight Scary
  65. Girl Lost
  66. Ghosts Can’t Do It
  67. Heist
  68. Mind, Body & Soul
  69. Candy

Embracing The Melodrama: The Client List (dir by Eric Laneuville)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2010’s The Client List, Jennifer Love Hewitt stars as Samantha Horton.

Samantha’s a former beauty queen whose mother (Cybill Shepherd) always hoped would go on to win Miss Texas and then maybe appear in movies and on television.  Instead, Samantha got knocked up by her boyfriend, Rex (Teddy Sears).  Rex was a football star at UT so marrying him didn’t seem like it would be a dead-in but then Rex blew out his knee.  Now, they’re living in small town Texas, they’ve got three children, and they’ve got a bank threatening to foreclose on their home.  When Samantha and Rex head down to the bank, their loan officer spends the entire time staring at Samantha’s chest while Samantha reveals that she has a photographic memory.

Desperately needing a job and with Rex drinking away his troubles, Samantha gets a job at a massage parlor the next town over.  Naively, Samantha assumed that her job would actually just be to give men massages.  Instead, it turns out that the massage parlor is actually a brothel where the workers continually tell each other that it “beats the heck out of waitressing.”

(They don’t say “heck” but I gave up cursing for Lent.)

At first, Samantha is disgusted by the idea of working as a prostitute.  But, with Rex drinking too much and the house about to bet taken away, Samantha goes back to the parlor and soon becomes the most popular person working there.  She works herself to exhaustion but one of her clients has just the solution for that.  “I’ve never even smoked weed before,” Samantha says while looking at the baggie of cocaine.  I’m sorry …. you dated someone who went to UT without ever smoking weed?  I don’t buy that.

Samantha can now stay awake for hours, going to work and buying her family a lot of Christmas presents.  Samantha’s clients include some of the most powerful men in the county.  When one of her co-workers confesses to having doubts about the job, Samantha sends her to a church group so she’ll have someone to talk to.  Soon, words gets out that the massage parlor is a house of prostitution and Samantha is getting arrested and led out of the parlor in her underwear while TV cameras roll.  “That looks kind of like your wife,” someone says to Rex.

The Client List caused quite a stir when it aired on Lifetime back in 2010.  (It also led to a TV series where Jennifer Love Hewitt starred as a different character.)  It’s an enjoyably sordid story, one that embraces the melodrama and mixes morality and sex in a way that would have made Cecil B. DeMille proud.  The film takes place in my homestate and, fortunately, it stars a lot of Texas-born actors so the accents are authentic, even if the dialogue was obviously written by a Yankee.  (“She’s as busy as popcorn,” a character said at one point and I nearly went blind from rolling my eyes.)  That the film actually carries some emotional weight is totally due to the lead performance of Jennifer Love Hewitt, who I’ve always liked because we’re both Texas girls and we’ve both got big boobs so I feel like we share the same struggle.  Hewitt gives an authentic and heartfelt performance here, leaving no doubt that everything that Samantha does, she does for her family.  The Client List is a true Lifetime classic.