Tag Archives: review

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: A Soldier’s Story (dir by Norman Jewison)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Set during World War II, 1984’s A Soldier’s Story opens with a murder.

On a rural road outside of a segregated army base in Louisiana, someone has gunned down Sergeant Vernon Walters (Adolph Caesar).  At the time, Walters was staggering back to the base after a night of heavy drinking.  Both the local authorities and Watlers’s fellow soldiers assume that the murder was the work of the Ku Klux Klan.  Captain Richard Davenport (Howard Rollins) isn’t so sure.

Captain Davenport is the officer who has been assigned to investigate the murder.  From the minute that he arrives at the base, the soldiers stare at him.  As Cpl. Ellis (Robert Townsend) explains it, the enlisted men are shocked because they’ve never seen a black officer before.  Some of the soldiers admire Davenport while other view him with suspicion, wondering what Davenport must have done or who he must have sold out to earn his commission.

Meanwhile, the other officers (who are all white) view Davenport with a combination of condescension and hostility.  Col. Nivens (Trey Wilson) only allows Davenport three days to wrap up his investigation and assigns the polite but skeptical Capt. Taylor (Dennis Lipscomb) to work with him.  Taylor suspects that Walters may have been murdered by the openly racist Lt. Byrd (Wings Hauser!).  Davenport, however, isn’t so sure.  Even though the official story is that Walters was a tough but fair sergeant who was respected by his company, Davenport suspects that one of them may have killed him.

Davenport and Taylor start to interview the soldiers who actually had to deal with Walters on a daily basis.  Through the use of flashbacks, Walters is revealed to be a far more complex man than anyone knew.  We see that Walters was a man who was bitterly aware of the fact that, even after a lifetime of military service, he was destined to always be treated as a second-class citizen by the nation that he served.  Unable to strike out at the men who the army and society had placed over him, Walters instead struck at the men serving underneath him.  While the man in Walters’s company wait for word on whether or not they’ll be allowed to serve overseas, Davenport tries to determine if one or more of them is a murderer.

A Soldier’s Story was adapted from a play but director Norman Jewison is careful to prevent the material from becoming stagey.  Effortlessly transitioning from the film’s present to flashbacks of the events that led to Walters’s murder, Jewison crafts both an incendiary look at race relations and a compelling murder mystery.  He’s helped by a strong cast of predominately African-American actors.  In one of his earliest roles, Denzel Washington plays Pfc. Peterson with a smoldering intensity.  David Alan Grier and Robert Townsend, two actors known for their comedic skills, impress in dramatic roles.  Seen primarily in flashbacks, Adolph Caesar turns Walters into a complex monster.

And yet, with all the talent on display, it is Howard Rollins who ultimately steals the movie.  As  a character, Captain Davenport has the potential to be a rather thankless role.  He spends most of the movie listening to other people talk and, because of his status as both an officer and a black man in the rural south, he’s rarely allowed to show much anger or, for that matter, any other emotion.  However, Rollins gives a performance of such quiet intelligence that Davenport becomes the most interesting character in the movie.  He’s the ultimate outsider.  Because of his higher rank and his role as an investigator, he can’t fraternize with the enlisted men but, as an African-American, he’s still expected to remain separate from and differential to his fellow officers.  As the only black officer on a segregated base, Davenport is assigned to stay in an empty barrack.  One of the best scenes in the film is Davenport standing alone and surveying the stark layout of his temporary quarters.  The expression on his face tells you everything you need to know.

(Towards the end of the film, when Davenport finally gets a chance to drop his rigid facade and, if just for one line, be himself, you want to cheer for him.)

A Soldier’s Story was nominated for best picture but it lost to another theatrical adaptation, Milos Forman’s Amadeus.

 

Music Video of the Day: Stop This Train by Adi Ulmansky (2013, dir by Yonathan Weitzman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, we have another music video from our queen, the amazing Adi Ulmansky.

As for what it’s all about …. well, I don’t know.  That’s the main reason I responded to the video.  The more surreal and dream-like the better has always been my philosophy and this video leaves me wondering if I should go to work tomorrow or if I should hide for a few days.  The sight of someone smiling while wearing clown make-up will do that to you.

Of course, it’s possible that J.W. Dunne was correct when he theorized that there is no such thing as “now” and all time may be happening all at once.  In which case, I’ve either already gone to work or I’m currently hiding in my house.  Of course, I may have misunderstood Dunne’s point.  To be honest, for the longest time, I thought John Gregory Dunne was the one with all the theories about how time worked but then I realized that I was confusing my Dunnes.  However, John Gregory Dunne did write a book called The Studio, which is the definitive portrait of Hollywood at the end of the studio system.  Dunne wrote a later book about Hollywood called Monster which is interesting just because it gives you all the details about went on behind the scenes during the production of one of the most forgettable films ever made.

Anyway, enjoy the video!

Music Video Of The Day: Cool Zombie by Adam Ant (2012, dir by Adam Ant and Adam Ross)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, what’s going on here?

I have to admit that my initial response to this video was to make a joke about how it was a look at a typical Thursday night at Johnny Depp’s place but I actually like this video too much to be snarky about it.  It may be an odd video but it’s a good kind of odd, I think  You have to earn the right to indulge in the surreal but I think this song and the video have done just that.

Watching this video, I get the feeling that I’m not so much looking at the end of the world as I’m looking at the day after the end of the world.  Society’s gone.  All the good clothes are gone.  You just have to wear whatever you can find.  But the music is still playing and the boats are still drifting and that’s a good thing.  It’s interesting that one thing that every post-apocalyptic vision seems to share in common is that people still desire entertainment.

Myself, I’ve already made my plans in case society collapses.  It mostly involves watching movies until the Earth plunges into the sun.  I’m thinking I’ll probably want to watch comedies.  I mean, if you know the world’s about to end, I think you would want to laugh as much as possible before the end comes.  Then again, I imagine some people would want to spend the end of the world watching movies about the end of the world just so they can brag about the irony of it all on twitter right before bursting into flame.

While the song is bluesy number about Tennessee, the title is a reference to how Adam Ant felt under the influence of his bipolar medication.  Speaking as someone who shares the struggle, Cool Zombie is the perfect way to put it.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Drugs by UPSAHL (2019, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I just came here to the party for the drugs….

Truer words have never been heard.

I always appreciate a song that’s about exactly what it says it is.  Even more so, I always like it when a video is about exactly what you think the song is about.  The song is called Drugs.  The song is about drugs.  There’s a lot of drugs to be found in the video.

(And honestly, who has never gone to a party just for the drugs?

Seriously, watching this video made me feel like it was 2007 all over again.)

Of course, neither the song nor the video are just about drugs.  They’re also about the empty banalities that most people use to get through life.  It’s about being so bored with our society and our culture that you turn to something that offers up an easy escape from all the bullshit of people at parties, dropping names and searching for fame.  It’s a song and a video about alienation and I absolutely love it and I’ll probably be singing it for the next few days.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Got To Keep On by The Chemical Brothers (2019, dir by Michel Gondry and Olivier Gondry)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

A new music video from The Chemical Brothers?

One that’s directed by Michel Gondry?

One that features a lot of dancing?

Of course, I love it!

That said, the video starts out so exuberantly but then it takes a bit off a strange turn about halfway through, which really shouldn’t be a shock considering that we’re talking about Gondry and The Chemical Brothers here.  While I wouldn’t go as far as to call it body horror (because no one appears to be particularly horrified), it still definitely feels as if our dancers taken a trip into the world of David Cronenberg.  Fortunately, things work out in the end.  They always do.

As I stated above, this video was directed by Michel Gondry, who will always have a place in the hearts of most cineastes for directing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Swallow My Gum by Lorena B (2011, dir by Ido Shor)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Before Adi Ulmansky went solo, she was a member of the Israeli experiment electronic group, Lorena B.  Along with creating a dream-like soundscape, Lorena B were known for their visceral and challenging music videos, the best of which were like surreal visual poems.

Take Swallow My Gum, for instance.  Swallow My Gum was both Lorena B’s first single and their first video.  (It was also the first track on their debut album, the self-produced Siblings.)  The video starts out as just another drive through the Israeli desert, just to get progressively stranger and stranger.  Is Adi just along for the ride or is she being held prisoner in the back of that car?  Is she traveling or is she being taken somewhere?  Are the answers even present in the video or is it more important that we decide for ourselves?  What are we to make of the child who continually flickers in out and existence?  Whenever I see her atop the power lines, I’m reminded of the scene in Twin Peaks: The Return, where Harry Dean Stanton watched a dead child’s soul disappear into a traffic light.

It’s a video that plays out like a dream of dark and disturbing things.

As for the song itself …. well, gum could be taken all sorts of way, couldn’t it?

Anyway, enjoy!

Music Video Of The Day: Animal by Aurora (2019, dir by Tim Mattia)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, this video starts out with Aurora stuck in a cage in a back of a truck and your natural reaction is to say, “Get her out of that cage!”  Of course, as soon as she gets out, she kills a man, starts to spit up eggs, and eventually finds herself in one of those dystopian clubs that everyone goes to in the future.  (I mean, even Britney Spears found herself stuck at one.)  

So, maybe things were actually better in the cage.  Perhaps that’s what the future  holds for us all — a cage of our own on the back of a truck.  Hopefully, there will be some variety as far as the cages are concerned.  Myself, I’d prefer a big cage that has room for a bad and a couch and nice TV.  It would appear that Aurora got suck in one of the cheaper cages, which just doesn’t seem right.

I believe that the point of this video is that everyone’s an animal, driven by animalistic desires.  I have to agree with that and it certainly does explain a lot about what’s been happening on twitter lately.  That said, I like the video mostly because I have a weakness for shadowy cityscapes.  There’s literally not a single song that can’t be improved by a music video taking place in a dark alley.

Enjoy!

Film Review: Peppermint (dir by Pierre Morel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

2018’s Peppermint is a film about a former banker named Riley North who kills a lot of people but it’s okay because she’s played by Jennifer Garner and has really pretty hair.

It’s also kinda justified because, five years earlier, Riley’s family was murdered and Riley didn’t get justice.  In fact, the perpetrators were acquitted in a trial that was so obviously fixed that I was surprised that no one started shouting “shenanigans.”  Along with hunting down the gang members who murdered her husband and daughter, Riley also murders the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and the judge.  I imagine she did this because Riley knows that if she didn’t kill at least one old white guy, the entire movie would just be the cringey spectacle of a white woman hunting down a group of Hispanic men.  Riley may not know how to get justice through conventional means but she’s still savvy enough to know that you’ve got to throw a few white dudes into your killing spree.  (Otherwise, people might notice that, with the exception of one character, every Latino in the film is portrayed as being a drug-dealing killer.)

We’d probably have more sympathy for Riley if we were not forced to sit through flashbacks designed to show how happy her family was.  Seriously, the Norths were so obnoxiously perfect that you kinda feel like they were tempting fate by just existing in a movie.  No one ever gets away with being that wonderful.  If you want to survive a movie like this, it helps to be dysfunctional.

Anyway, as you watch the film, you might find yourself wondering how Riley learned how to be such an efficient killing machine.  I know that I did  It turns out that, after losing faith in the system, Riley spent five years wandering the world, volunteering with Catholic Relief Services, and trying to find grace through suffering.  No, just kidding!  Actually, she robbed the bank where she worked and then she fled to Singapore where she became an MMA fighter.  (Don’t look at me like that, I’m not the one who wrote this damn movie.)  Now, she’s returned to the United States and she’s blowing shit up.

Fortunately, it turns out that the people who killed Riley’s family are no longer as clever as they were in the past.  How else can you explain their inability to not get blown up or shot in the head?  Peppermint is the type of film that asks you to believe that a group of criminals are so powerful that they can bride a state judge but they’re also so incompetent that a someone in their 40s can pick them off, one-by-one.  This is one of those films where people are only smart when the film’s plot requires them to be.  Otherwise, everyone in Peppermint is dumb as a sack of rocks.

Peppermint attempts to be a female version of Death Wish but it’s not as much fun.  The Death Wish remake may have gotten slaughtered by the critics but it’s still kind of enjoyable to watch because Eli Roth doesn’t hold back from emphasizing how ludicrous the film is.  Peppermint‘s director, Pierre Morel, takes the material a bit too seriously.  That approach may have worked when Morel directed Taken but, in the years since Liam Neeson murdered half of Paris to rescue his daughter, we’ve seen so many Taken rip-offs that the only way to approach the material is in the spirit of self-parody.  If you’re going to have a banker go to Singapore and become a cage fighter so that she can then return to America and blow up a retired criminal court judge, you have to have a sense of humor about it.

I do have to say, though, that I disagree with those critics who claimed Peppermint was one of the worst films of 2018.  It’s not terrible as much as its just kind of forgettable.

Film Review: The Ride (dir by Michael O. Sajbel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Do you own a horse?”

Because I was born and live in Texas, a friend of mine used to ask me that constantly.  His assumption was that everyone in Texas wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse to work.  That, of course, is not true.  I imagine that you’re more likely to see people on horseback in Central Park than you are in downtown Dallas.  As well, for the most part, if you see anyone wandering around Dallas wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, chances are that they’re from up north.  Northerners love to come down to Dallas and see where Kennedy was shot and ask if everything really is bigger in Texas.  It gets annoying after a while.  Of course, I’d by lying if I said that there weren’t any cowboys in Texas.  And yes, there are people down here who own horses.  We’ve got our ranchers and our oilmen and our farmers.  We just don’t have as many as people up in Minnesota seem to assume that we do.

And, to be honest, I’ve known a few cowboys.  If you dig around my family tree, you’ll find a few people who have worked the rodeo circuit.  For the most part, the cowboys I’ve known have been a proud group of people.  They’re not really emotional and they might not spend much time on twitter but you can depend on them to get the job done without a lot of crying and that’s always kind of a nice thing.

As an actor, Michael Biehn has always seemed uniquely right for cowboy roles.  He’s a low-key actor who doesn’t feel the need to always be the center of attention and who does his job with a minimum amount of fuss.  What he does, he does well.  Much like the best cowboys, an actor like Michael Biehn often gets taken for granted.  Viewers just always assume that he’ll always be there, delivering laconic one-liners and viewing the world through weary but never defeated eyes.

Michael Biehn plays a cowboy in the 1997 film, The Ride.  His name is Smokey Banks and he’s the type of character who, if you’ve ever spent any time at a rodeo, you’ll recognize immediately.  He used to be one of the world’s greatest bull riders but now, he’s getting older.  He still walks like a cowboy but he’s definitely moving a bit slower than he used to.  He drinks too much.  He spends too much time with the buckle bunnies.  He’s like a downbeat country song come to life.

But fear not …. redemption is coming for Smokey.  And, like all good redemption arcs, it all starts with being sentenced to community service.  Smokey can either go to jail or he can go to a ranch and teach a bunch of boys how to be a cowboy.  Along the way, he befriends a terminally ill, religious young man (Brock Pierce) who wants to learn how to ride a bull and he also ends up spending some time at a tent revival.  Yes, it’s a religious film but, fortunately, it was made before the whole God’s Not Dead phenomenon so it never gets as preachy or apocalyptic as some other faith-based films.  One gets the feeling that Smokey would find Kirk Cameron to be as annoying as the rest of us do.

It’s a sweet film.  I mean, it’s not a movie that’s going to surprise you.  It’s unapologetic about being sentimental but, at the same time, it’s such a good-natured film that it’s hard to really dislike it.  Michael Biehn grounds the film with his typically low-key charm.  Biehn turns Smokey into a real person and, as much as you might try to resist, it’s hard not to get swept up in his emotional journey.  Considering that the film’s audience was probably limited to kids and church groups, Biehn easily could have gotten away with just phoning in his performance.  That’s the sign of a good actor, though.  Like the best cowboys, they’re good even when they don’t have to be.