..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Hancock
with Argento's The Mother of Tears ...
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

HANCOCK (Two stars)
U.S.; Peter Berg (Columbia)

A movie like Hancock, the radically misfiring new Will Smith superhero comedy, can actually drive you a little crazy while you watch it.
    
What went wrong? How can this big, expensive talent-laden movie possibly have gotten so bad? How did a lineup that includes Smith, Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman and a roster of moviemakers that has director Peter Berg, writer Vince Gilligan (The X Files) and producers Michael Mann, Akiva Goldsman and James Lassiter, jointly conjure up a movie so crass, pointless and cliché-packed that, after a half hour or so, you can’t wait for it to be over? Who dreamed up those in-your-face sight gags with superhero Hancock (Smith) swishing long-range jail yard basketball shots and exploding out of the sidewalks, or those familiar streets in front of Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre crumbling and getting torn up by super-heroine Theron?
    
Contemplating this movie is about as pleasureless as if you suddenly heard that Pixar had announced, as their next project, their first live action comedy, a 100 million dollar scene-for-scene remake of The Road to Morocco starring Pauly Shore and George W. Bush as Bob and Bing.
    
Did the moviemakers have any premonitions of disaster when they included a train-wreck as one of their big visual gags? Probably not. Hancock will probably make tons of bucks for a while, and the train crash gag -- where seedy superhero John Hancock (Will Smith) rescues trapped-on-the-tracks P. R. executive Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), while demolishing an onrushing freight train -- is actually one of the better jokes in a movie that could use many, many more.
    
But Hancock is definitely not in a league with this summer‘s two previous superhero blockbusters, the surprisingly witty Iron Man and the surprisingly emotional The Incredible Hulk. And it’s also miles behind the regular hero hit, Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull. Frankly, it’s on a level with homeless-hero nerdfest Drillbit Taylor and I’m not so sure Drillbit doesn’t have the edge. The most surprising thing about Hancock is how unfunny, silly, mercenary-minded and seemingly thoughtless most of it is.
    
Anyway, instead of the classic superheroes we get from those old fogies at Marvel, here we get the superhero as anti-social drunk and foul-mouthed, bad-tempered bum, living in a scrappy double trailer in Malibu: a cool but nasty, raggedy-butt hero who digs Miles Davis and thinks costumed crime fighters look like “homos.”
    
That’s sort of funny; it might have even drawn a smile from the late, great George Carlin, up there in four-letter heaven. But the concept, and the movie, hit the drivel zone fast.
    
It doesn’t seem fair to blame Will Smith, though he picked the script. He also supplies the charisma and star power and (in a twisted-up way) the easy-going likeability (we like the actor, not the character) that he‘s being paid for. But it’s hard to see why he wanted to play such a charmless egomaniacal outsider and jerk, especially when the jerk has so few funny lines.

SPOILER

As for Theron, why did they have to make her a super-heroine? Just because Smith is a superhero? Some warped tit-for-tat agenda?

SPOILER ENDS

The writers -- and there must have been more of them involved than just poor Vince Gilligan and Vy Vincent Ngo, who take the blame here -- stick with the notion of Hancock as an anti-superhero of sorts, a super-prick who has alienated the entire fed-up L. A. populace with his bad attitude and destructive ways. Into his life, after that train wreck rescue, comes Ray -- a P.R. whiz married to Theron’s knockout Mary (no Hancock fan, it seems).
    
And Ray, a basically decent and good-hearted guy who’s been trying to recruit big-bucks corporations into his new charity “heart” program, now decides to give Hancock a makeover: a new attitude and a spiffy new (presumably non-homo) costume. He also suggests Hancock get right with the law and his unintentional victims by serving jail time to make up for past damages -- voluntary time, of course, since no jail can hold him-- and that he keep saying “nice job” to the cops, firefighters and innocent bystanders involved in his crime-busting escapades.
    
Hmmm. Was this idea inspired by the familiar P.R. guy role of cleaning up messes for errant superstars?

 

SPOILERS

Whatever its source, it quickly collapses into nonsense -- and so does nearly everything else, including the loony plot twist involving Mary‘s super-past, the absurd jail scenes where a head is shoved up somebody’s ass (ah, the wonders of special effects), the sub par villains (despite Marsan‘s best/worst efforts), the ludicrous opening freeway chase, and nearly everything else the moviemakers give us -- including trying to sell the notion that the entire city except Ray would so ignore a guy who can fly past skyscraper tops and stop a speeding locomotive bare-handed. No gold-diggers? No hangers-on? No worshipful bums? No endorsement-peddling ad execs? No star struck tourists? No nosy TV or print or internet reporters? No harassing local and federal agents? No way.

SPOILERS END

Berg’s white-hot cinema verite camera style -- which worked for “Friday Night Lights” but not as well, in my opinion, for his “The Kingdom” -- seems all wrong here. Packed with handheld jiggles and slashed with doc-style cutting, it fits this kind of movie about as well as a dominatrix outfit and bikinis would fit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s been a pretty good summer for movie superheroes, but “Hancock” is a super-bum super-bummer that flies right off the tracks. Nice job? Uh, not exactly.

(Sections of this review appeared in my Chicago Daily Herald review of Hancock. - MW)



THE MOTHER OF TEARS (Three stars)
Italy; Dario Argento (The Weinstein Company)
  
A better movie than Hancock -- though it’s so gory it may drive some audiences right out the door -- is the latest chapter in Italian horrormeister Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, a blood-stained, visually gaudy and arresting shivery triptych that now includes Argento’s classic Suspiria (1977), the first sequel, Inferno ( 1980), and this one. Mother of Sighs, Mother of Darkness, Mother of Tears.
    
Like the first four movies of the Rocky series, in a weird way, these three movies are basically all the same story, getting bigger and more expensive. The core plot -- a lady-in-distress (or lady and guy in distress) pursued by demons and witches -- stays pretty much the same. But the arena gets bigger. In Suspiria, it was Jessica Harper in a girl’s ballet school in Freiburg, Germany. In Inferno, it was Irene Miracle and brother Leigh McLoskey in another, bigger school, in New York. Here, its director Dario‘s iconic actress daughter Asia vs. the worst satan-witch of them all, the Mother of Tears (Moran Atlas) in a bigger place in Rome -- in fact, in almost all Rome itself, turned into a gruesome devil’s den and thrill-city.
     
Along with Deep Red, Suspiria has always been my favorite Argento; his scripts tend to be thin, hokey and outrageous, but he can always shock your socks off once or twice. (You can see most of the movies -- though you’ll want to be picky -- on Anchor Bay DVD.) So I can appreciate fans who’ve been waiting 27 years for this one. It’s bloody as hell, but, unlike some superficially classier directors, Argento know where to point his camera. Like his fellow horror ace countryman Mario Bava, he’s a wicked treat for the politically incorrect and the aesthetically adventurous.



MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

My Blueberry Nights (Three and a half stars)
U. S.; Wong Kar Wai, 2008 (Weinstein Company)

My Blueberry Nights is a sweet movie romance and a jazzy film noir reverie that, at its best, wafts you right back to the moods and themes of the American maverick cinema of the ‘70s, a great era that many of us miss. Nights --the U.S. directorial debut of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai (Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love) and the film acting debut of Grammy winning singer-composer Norah Jones -- is an unabashed romance for grownups, visually stunning, well-written and very well-acted by a pretty gifted cast that also includes Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Frankie Faison and (in one of her top screen performances as a saucy poker tourney ace) Natalie Portman.
    
Wong, as before, is adept at conveying longing, obsession and the agonies of unrequited love (Arnie’s or, for a while, Jeremy‘s).The movie is ravishing to look at and a delight to listen to, one of Wong’s blissful romantic dreams. Ry Cooder composed the score, Darius Khondji photographed the people and places, and Wong’s co writer is the sharp, prolific American crime novelist Lawrence Block (8 Million Ways to Die) who smartly taps the classic film noir vein. For everyone who thinks his Arnie-Sue Lynne wasted lives sequence is a cliché, I can only say, I know these people, I know these feelings. Wong’s first American movie is a torch song on a dark barroom jukebox, about slices of blueberry pie, tears, postcards and broken noir hearts.

CLASSIC RELEASES

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (2 discs) (Three and a half stars)
Japan/U.S.; Paul Schrader, 1985 (Criterion Collection)

Patriotism (The Rite of Love and Death) (Three stars)
Japan; Yukio Mishima, 1966 (Criterion Collection)

Yukio Mishima, one of 20th Century Japan‘s most famous and admired authors, was a would-be modern samurai, who wielded a deadly pen -- and who died a bloody, theatrical death, committing hara-kiri (or seppuku) after a failed attempt at taking over a garrison with his own private army and trying to inspire a military revolt.
    
Schrader’s Mishima, produced by Francis Coppola and George Lucas, interweaves a tense drama of novelist Mishima‘s last day and his failed samurai rebellion, interwoven with black and white flashbacks to his biography and highly stylized dramatizations of sections of Mishima’s, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses. (Permission for a fourth excerpt, from Forbidden Colors, was denied by Mishima’s family because of that book’s homosexual content.)
    
I was mixed on Mishima when it came out in 1985. But today it seems to me much better, more complete, more moving, than it did in 1985, when I was looking for something closer in impact to Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. The film, which takes some of its stylistic cues from classicist/Buddhist filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu and some from rebel/experimentalist Nagisa Oshima, lacks a certain effortless grace and force. Like Mishima‘s life and art, it seems willed. But Schrader’s chronicle of a death foretold remains one of the most artful and piercing movie biographical dramas of its time -- or ours.
(In Japanese, with English subtitles and narration.) Extras: commentary by Schrader and Alan Poul; BBC documentary “The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima“; narrations in both Japanese (by Ken Ogata) and English (by Roy Scheider); interviews with Mishima, Bailey, Glass and others; booklet with essays by Kevin Jackson and others.

Patriotism gives us an even more intimate look at Mishima and his fixations on militarism, art, and self-immolation. A chaste, silent black-and-white adaptation of one of his short stories, it features Mishima as a dedicated soldier, Lt. Takeyama, bent on hara-kiri. The style and setting suggest noh theater, enacted in classic Japanese interiors and a raked Zen garden, and the suicide scene itself is scarily rapt. Patriotism, the runner-up in the dramatic shorts category at the 1966 Tours Short Film Festival, is deeply disturbing, both because of the beauty it finds in self-destruction and slit bellies and the ways it turns sadomasochism into art. (Silent, with English intertitles.)
Extras: “Making of” documentary; Mishima interview and audio recording; booklet with Tony Rayns essay, Mishima production notes and original Mishima short story “Patriotism.”

 

BOX SET

Glitterbox: Four Films by Derek Jarman (Three and a half stars)
U.K.; Derek Jarman, 1985-94 (Zeitgeist)

This four film box set of pictures by the late Derek Jarman showcases the work of one of the most uncompromising and gifted independent filmmakers of the 20th century. Jarman began as a painter and as Ken Russell’s designer on that incendiary drama of religion, history and sex, The Devils. When he became a writer-director, with 1976’s Sebastiane, (on St. Sebastian) he used his painterly gifts and literate bent to unleash one of the most defiant gay sensibilities of his era.

The Angelic Conversation, the filmmaker’s own personal favorite, and Caravaggio show Jarman at the top of his game: the former a lyrical examination of the homoerotic implications of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as read by Dame Judi Dench, the latter a stunning portrait of the outlaw life of the great maverick religious painter, Michelangelo Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), with a cast that includes Jarman favorite Tilda Swinton, Sean Bean, Michael Gough and Robbie Coltrane, caught in gorgeous frames that duplicate the artist’s own lush chiaroscuro style.
    
Wittgenstein and Blue were released by Jarman in 1993, one year before his death from AIDS. The former is another unique bio-drama, starring Johnson as the rebellious, closeted Viennese-British philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein and presenting his life as a rich burlesque full of academic conflict, Martians, and movie house lust (Wittgenstein’s favorite movie actresses were Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton), costarring Gough as Bertrand Russell, Swinton as Lady Morrell, and John Quentin as John Maynard Keynes. The devastating Blue, made when the director was virtually blind, backdrops Jarman‘s musings on life, death and art with a solid, unvarying screen of blue, the last color left in his rich palette.
    
Includes: The Angelic Conversation (Jarman, 1985) (Four stars). Caravaggio (Jarman, 1986) (Four stars). Wittgenstein (Jarman, 1993) (Three stars). Blue (Jarman, 1994) (Three stars).
Extras: Commentary by Beristain (on Caravaggio); interviews with Jarman, Swinton and others, featurettes, short films (Alex Bistikas’ “The Clearing”); storyboards; design sketches; and liner notes by Colin McCabe.

 

- Michael Wilmington
July 3, 2008

June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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